Sorry I’ve been a bit quiet this last week – I was away last weekend, hanging out with my best friends, then last week at work was too busy for me to have the energy to write any posts – I organise events for a bookshop and last week there were 9 events! Also I’d finished my Banksia a little while ago but hadn’t had a chance to take any photos. Any way, enough with apologies and onto my new favourite top!

As I mentioned a while ago, I bought Megan Nielsen’s Banksia Top a little while ago and I almost immediately got to work on it. I cut out the xs as it was still a bit big for my bust measurement – but since it’s not meant to be fitted, I figured it wouldn’t matter. And I love it!

The fabric is some lovely, soft pink stripey cotton I got from one of the shops in Goldhawk Road – I forget which one. It’s the same one where I bought the cake fabric for my friend’s apron and the price was meant to be £7.99 per metre but he did it at £5.99 per metre because I had bought some other things – lovely man!

I tried my hardest to match the stripes on the side seams and it almost worked:

I also french seamed all of the seams, including the sleeve seams. I’d never done that before so used the French All Your Seams tutorial on Grainline Studio’s blog. It looks so pretty on the inside, it makes me stupidly happy!

I like the look of the bias binding that neatens the collar too – clever pattern drafting:

As you can see in that photo, I cheated and used poppers instead of buttons. I hate, hate, hate, sewing button holes and wanted the top finished and didn’t want to mess it up with the fabric getting chewed up with the button holes going wrong. I sewed some buttons on the top to make it look like it was fastened with buttons – cheater!

I love the over-sized collar but boy did it take ages to clip all the notches before turning it the right way round!

The pattern was pretty easy to assemble – the collar was easy to sew in. The only complicated bit is the placket – I used method 2 for putting it in and there was one point where I got a bit confused,  but Megan Nielsen has a sew-along on her website and with some more photos, it became clear how to do it.

I’m just going to put this last picture in because what am I doing with my face?!

So to sum up, I love this top! I also love pink, which is a new development!