Hack-up colour blocked Briar

I've been making more Briar tops. The first one is in high rotation which has got to be a sign of a good pattern, I think! First I made my mum one for her birthday recently in a lovely deep orangey/red. The fabric is quite thin but has some merino wool content and a lovely drape. I took a chance and guessed at her size and the length, and she tells me it fits - yay!

I also made myself another, this time the longer length, with a pinkish jersey type of fabric from my stash. I think it's all synthetic - need to remember to wear deodorant with this one, which is a sure sign it's synthetic in my experience!! (sorry if that was too much detail ;-)



Anyway, it came together OK but I wore it a couple of times and it just wasn't working for me... maybe the drape of the fabric is wrong for the length or something but it just didn't sit right. See in the pic above I'm trying to distract myself from this by adding one of my pretty Elk beaded necklaces ;-)

So yesterday I hacked into it and added a panel of colour to the base. I could have just left it as a cropped length version, but I was curious to see how my mental vision would work out. I used a piece of equally weird fabric from the stash, but in a very pretty deep blue/purple colour.



It doesn't photograph so well, but it's sitting much better now and I'm much happier with it. You can see below that it's lost the weird thing going on from the back and is just not so ho-hum anymore. It's a bit dodgy and wonky, and that fabric really isn't great, so I'm treating this as a wearable muslin and will definitely make another in nice fabric next.



It was really easy to make this adjustment, I just cut off the bottom section of the top at crop length (taken from the original pattern), then made new pattern pieces for the back and front by tracing from the pattern the gap between the cropped and long versions (see pics below). Then I sewed these pieces on and re-sewed the side seams. Megan has some great posts on her blog about how you can alter the Briar pattern to get different looks. I'd love to try the elbow patches next.



I love a good hack-up, so cathartic :-) Do you like hacking up?

Belatedly linking up with My Creative Space today. Click here for lots of inspiration.