PM Patterns Blog Tour: Mademoiselle Gus top

I’m excited to share today about a lovely pattern company called PM Patterns.  This is a French brand of patterns established in 2012. I was excited to join in on this blog tour when I looked at the beautiful patterns on the website.  I was quite drawn in to Karine’s elegant design aesthetic.

For this tour, I received the Mademoiselle Gus pattern to review. I was initially intrigued with this pattern as it calls for a lightweight woven fabric (and I’m quite excited to sew more woven garments this year).  The pattern description from the website is as follows:

Top aimed at ladies and young ladies, with turn-up sleeves and shoulder tabs. The curved neckline is tied by a nice fabric bow. The bottom band lies smoothly around the waist, but the most charming feature of this top is the lovely gathered shoulder.

Pattern Size Chart and Fabric Requirements:

My project info

Version: There technically is one version in this pattern.  I decided to slightly vary from the pattern and omit the sleeve tabs.  The voile that I used has nice drape but I felt that I would prefer the sleeve tab feature with a more drapey fabric, like chiffon.

Fabric

The pattern suggests:

• Fabric 1: poplin, linen, chiffon, knit, crepon voile, any lightweight fabric…
• Fabric 2: any lightweight fabric…

I used a lovely Art Gallery cotton voile fabric.  The print is called Painted Desert and the designer is Bari J (for Art Gallery Fabrics). 

Size: Bust/36, Waist/38, Hips/40

I chose to intentionally size down when picking sizing for this top.  The bodice is loose (without bust darts) so I liked the idea of the top being slightly fitted (in the shoulders and waistband) yet also being loose and flowy (in the waist and sleeves).  I was happy with the sizing that I picked.

I made a muslin for this top (in a vintage cotton/poly bed sheet).  I was initially thinking about omitting the back tie and applying a button and loop.  What I found with the muslin was that if used a button at the back neck, it will bring the neckline in higher.  I don’t usually like higher necklines so I decided for my final to keep it simple and utilize the tie feature in the back.

The pattern suggests cutting fabric to make your own ties but I liked the idea for this version to use a pre-made material for my tie.  I used seam tape for my top as the “ribbon.”

The neckband and back loop are finished with a fabric facing.  I choose to use the same fabric in the facing as my outer top.  I let the edge of the pattern piece for the facing go into the selvedge (to squeeze these pieces out of as small of a length of fabric as possible).  For the sizing that I sewed, the ends of the facings are trimmed off.  Squeezing these pattern pieces out of this approach helped save the larger pieces of fabric for future projects.  The picture below illustrates my approach with the facing ends (on the larger pattern piece).

(The picture above shows the selvedge end that I trimmed off after applying the facing to the neckline)

Future Plans:

I would love to make this top in a linen or chiffon!  I also think picking a solid fabric would be a fun second version (with a printed fabric for the back tie).  I may shorten the ribbon length.  I made the back tie at the suggested length in the pattern but I’m debating if I want to shorten the length slightly.

I did want to note one detail at the end of this post.  The digital patterns from PM Patterns are currently in the A0 and A4 file size.  For my versions, I chose to work with the A4 file size.  I live in the U.S. and do not have A4 paper but I was able to pick up a ream of US legal paper at a local Office Supply store (at a very reasonable price).  I was able to print the A4 paper with no problems, on my home printer. 

One challenge I did see is that US legal paper is much longer in length then I’m use to working with for PDF patterns (14″ in length vs 11″ in length for the US letter size).  After I printed the US Legal pages I chose to trim the left side of each page and fold the top edge of each page as well.  In my rush to tape the pattern together (and I did not trim all the way around the pages), I slightly misaligned the edges of the paper.  As a result when I put together the pattern, my front piece was longer than the back piece.  This issue was due to my slight misalignment in the taping of the pattern pieces.  What I did to fix this issue was trim the front piece of fabric to match the back length.  Then I added the bottom band as normal.

I will say that now that I have US legal paper handy at home, I won’t mind printing A4 size paper in the future.  The next time I put together a pattern on A4 paper, I will go more slowly in the assembly process (taping the pages together).  The results from this garment was more than worth the extra time to put the pieces together.

I would encourage you to check out the other lovely projects that are being made on this tour.  I always enjoy seeing other sewers projects, observing which fabrics they chose and seeing the patterns in action.

Click the following link to enter the Rafflecopter giveaway  You can win one free PM pattern with this giveaway.

Pm-Patterns Blog Tour

• March, 13th: Lilla-Gumma/My Sewing Roots
• March, 14th: Sew Sew Ilse/Threadistry/ Seams Sew Lo
• March, 15th: Sprouting JubeJube/Sewrendipity/Sewvolution
• March, 16th: Sewing Vortex/OakBlue Designs/AusChick
• March, 17th Octaves of Color