PM Pattern Blog Tour - Colombine Top, plus pattern giveaway!

I am so excited to be participating in a blog tour for Pm-Patterns. I tend to really love European patterns, I find a lot of them have that classic look and clean lines that I am drawn to for dressing the cub.

Before I jump into my long-winded (and photo heavy) monologue about this darling top I'm going to first tell you that there is a giveaway to with a pattern down at the bottom of this post! So make sure you get down there somehow to enter. Even if that means scrolling right past everything else. (I always think I shouldn't post quite so many pictures, but then we get so many nice ones that I just can't help myself.)

Choosing which pattern I wanted to make was easy because the Colombine top/dress is just soooo good, but the hard part was figuring out what I actually wanted to do with it! I went back and forth between doing a nice, warm dress or a summer-y top. I even bought a beautiful cotton flannel that looks a lot like wool to make a dress with, then finally decided to do a top since we should hopefully be having nice weather soon, and I figured I could make the dress next fall. Of course our weather has been so cold and wet that I probably could have sewn up the dress and had her get plenty of wear out of it after all! Oh, well. I made a beautiful summer-y top and even if she is having to layer a shirt underneath it for now this winter cannot last forever!

I sewed up the top version with the ruffles. The ruffles took a bit of time to get pinned on nicely, but it was well worth the effort. Plus I did it while catching up on Project Runway: Allstars, so again, time well spent.

I tried a few new-to-me tricks for this project. One, this PDF pattern comes with a copy shop sized file, so I had it printed at Fed-Ex and saved myself all of the trimming and taping. This was so. worth. it. I wish every pattern came with this option, because it saves me so much time (and time is not something I have a lot of when it comes to sewing). 

To push myself I used my narrow hem foot to hem the ruffles. It went...as it usually does. I started the first one, sewing at the most glacial pace ever. Stitch. Stitch. Stitch. I started getting self-congratulatory in my head, thinking Wow! See, practice really does help you get better! Look at how good these are looking! I can do this! Toward the end of the first ruffle I started getting a bit overly confident and picking up some speed. Stitch stitch stitch. Stitch stitch stitch. Then suddenly I realize I've lost it and it's only folding over once, instead of twice. I get back on track and slow down. I finish. Woohoo! Next ruffle. Stitch. Stitch. Stitch. I start to go faster. My mind starts to wander. I'm thinking about what I'm going to make for dinner, or wondering where the cub is and if she's being too quiet (which usually means mischief). I finish the ruffle and realize I lost the double fold like three times throughout. Very small sections, at least! 😑 Oh well. Overall it was better than lots of my attempts and I'll just keep practicing.

The other new thing I did was to use a decorative machine stitch on the edge of the ruffles. My sweet mother-in-law surprised me at the end of last summer with a new sewing machine, The Rachel by Babylock. I feel like I'm still learning about all of the things this machine can do, including it's 50 different stitches. To be completely honest, I'd never really cared for the look of decorative machine stitches. I love hand embroidery, and I feel like it loses some of that charm when done by machine. But when I saw the decorative stitch options on this machine I realized I could see myself actually using some of them. I still had to really push myself to actually go for it on this project, though. I was worried I'd get them on there and completely regret it! My material has a very subtle stripe, so I chose a stitch that had a blocky shape to go with that. I practiced with slightly different thread colors on scraps first, and finally committed to my ruffles (reassuring myself at the same time that I could cut new ones if I hated it). I ended up really loving the result, though, so they stayed!

I decided to add a placket to the back of this top. I did this purely because it reminded me of The Geranium dress with a slightly higher waistline, and I've found I have to add a placket onto that pattern in order to not make getting the cub in and out of the dress/top not be a total fight. However, this top definitely does not need a placket and I won't be adding one in the future. 

I have a few sewing goals for this year, and one of them is to sew a big dent in my fabric stash. Jeff gets really excited when I mention this, so I'm really trying for his sake. So everything on this top was already in my sewing bin! The fabric was formerly a sheet and the buttons were some that I had picked up on clearance a while ago. They aren't a perfect color match but I let the cub choose and she likes them a lot, which was exactly what I assumed would happen when I bought them.

Now, onto the good stuff!!

First, check out the other stops on this blog tour and see more lovely projects made from Pm-patterns. Then once you've fallen in love with several of the designs and realized you need them all you can enter the giveaway to win one!


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

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