Alice in OliveLand

A little while back I found myself in the soft furnishing fabric section of Spotlight when I happened upon a couple of terrific cotton fabrics.  One was navy blue with white houses on it and the other was olives.  Obviously perfect for say kitchen curtains or a tablecloth, but honestly I thought it was just fabulous fabric.  I think it would have looked great in a vintage frock but I wanted to try the Tessuti Alice dress/top pattern out.  Plus they were both a bargain at $5 a metre.  You don't get that in the dress fabric section. 

This was a lovely easy pattern to make. Probably the most time consuming part was putting the PDF pattern together, which is always a bit of a bore.  I did read bloggers who said it tended to run to the large sizes and my friend has made a few of the tops which seem a bit low cut at the sides, which I don't really like given what happens to your skin of your underarm area as you age, not pretty. So I made it to a small and it fits perfectly.  

I did one silly thing during the construction and put one of the arm bands on the wrong way around.  I didn't even notice until the next day when I tried it on.  There was the understitching mocking me on the outside.  I had thought about just leaving it and pretending it was a topstitch and then just do a row of stitching on the other side. Then I decided to do the right thing and it didn't take that long to unpick and put around the right way.  Very happy with my kitchen curtain inspired fabric.