Agnes/Molly tops

As I mentioned when I posted my Seamwork Rory top a couple of months ago, my wardrobe has been in need of some new summer t-shirts. When this beautiful floral jersey popped up in my Instagram feed one day from Material Girl Laura (sadly it no longer seems to be in stock), I snapped some up to help boost my t-shirt collection.

The only question then was what pattern to make with it. While I really like my Rory top, I wanted this to be more of a "normal" t-shirt. I considered the patterns that I've already made and, while none of them seemed to be quite right, they weren't far enough from being right to justify buying another pattern so I decided to do a bit of low key pattern hacking to make something to my exact specifications.

The Tilly & The Buttons Agnes top is very close to what I wanted, the only problem was that I wanted the neckline to be a little bit higher. While I like the Agnes neckline in general, on me I think t-shirts with slightly higher necklines look better when I wear them with pinafores. Thankfully I have the Sew Over It Molly top (I think I got it free with a magazine), which has a neckline more like what I was looking for, so I simply redrew the neckline on my Agnes pattern pieces using my Molly pattern, and also used the neckband from the Molly top.

While this was a fairly simple pattern hack, I didn't want to cut straight into my pretty floral jersey without being sure that it would be what I wanted so I dug out this bird print jersey for a trial run. While it's Art Gallery jersey, so it's not exactly cheap fabric in itself, it's the leftovers of a piece that I won in a giveaway a couple of years ago (therefore it didn't cost me anything) and I'd already used part of it to make my first Gable top (therefore I'd already got a very successful and much worn garment out of it) so it felt like it was fairly low risk fabric to experiment with.

As you can probably already guess, my plan worked out nicely so I went ahead and made a second version of the top in the floral jersey and had a lovely Sunday afternoon sewing it up at a leisurely pace. While I enjoy tackling more complicated projects sometimes, often my favourite sewing sessions are ones spent working on simple projects where you can relax a bit without too much risk of having to reach for the seam ripper!

I'm really happy to be able to add these two into my t-shirt drawer. They're great basics so they'll definitely be worn a lot, the floral version is super pretty and the trial run version has put another piece of leftover fabric to good use. What more could you want?