Victory patterns Ava in silk

Finally it stopped raining long enough for me to take some pics of my Ava top. Yikes - our back yard looks like a swimming pool!

As I mentioned in my last post about the muslin for this, I love the Victory Patterns Ava pattern. And even though it had its trials I was pleased with this version, which I wore to a friend's birthday party recently.



It was my first time working with such fine and slippery fabrics and I found them pretty difficult to work with, so it was quite a frustrating sew. The main part of the top I made by cutting up a silk sarong gifted to me from a lovely friend. She had found it in a charity shop, and the tag said 'Akira' - what a find! It moved around and seemed to stretch in a weird way - the side panels of this pattern are cut on the bias, and they dropped a lot. Maybe this is typical of silk but when I went to hem it the hem was extremely wonky and I ended up adjusting it by eye.



I'd wanted to use a sheer fabric for the top part, and grabbed a piece of what I think might be organza from a local shop, not having time to go looking elsewhere. This was a real pain to work with! all those little seams that need to be perfect as they were all on display drove me mad! Not only could the fabric not be pressed but also it just didn't roll well. I ended up with sore fingers from overworking the synthetic fabric and very grab that it would be night time when I wore it so all the imperfections wouldn't be seen!!



I swore that next time I had something special to sew I'd take the time to find a natural fibre fabric, especially when my main fabric was so lovely. Then on the afternoon of the party I was looking for a scarf to wear with it and found not one but 2 garments in silk that I'd reserved for repurposing - and either would have been perfect!! So that's a lesson to me to always check my stash first. I'm hoping to one day unpick the awful organza and replace it with the cream silk. I made the this little scarf from the 2 fabrics, just joining them with a seam and then hemming it.



And just as an aside, something I love about going out somewhere special is being able to get out some of my old favourites - I never get tired of my origami earrings, my ankle strap heals got an outing and wearing my old black satin trousers is always fun :-) How about you, do you like dressing up now and then? And does working with sheer fabrics make you crazy?!