A Fabricville Velour Vogue Tunic

I am once again sharing a project which I made up for Fabricville Canada, as part of their blogging program. This is a beautiful velour tunic which I just *love*! (check out their blog here -- you will recognize a few other sewing bloggers there too!)

I used Vogue 9275, a wardrobe pattern, focusing on View B, the tunic. Although the pattern calls for lightweight knits for this item, I saw it made up in velvet by Lori at Girls in the Garden last fall, and thought it was such a gorgeous idea that I had to jump on this stretch velour when I saw it.

Actually I spent quite a bit of time in my local store petting the bolts until I received this maroon piece from Fabricville. Then I bought some more in pink. More on that later this month... This is such a wonderfully soft fabric, it's like you are wearing a Gund. My coworkers couldn't hold themselves back from petting my shoulders today. Really, though I usually don't go for polyesters, I had to have it. There is still a medium gray and a navy that I have my eye on....

In any case, the tunic is a great pattern -- so easy to make -- three pieces, a front, back, and cowl. This is a cowl which is cut straight across the grain, so it's more of a slouchy tube neck than a drapey cowl. It's warm and cozy. The feel of this cushy fabric on your neck is marvellous. I left out the drawstring ties as they don't seem to match a more luxury fabric, plus I wanted to wear necklaces with this.

I cut a large as I did want this to have an oversize and long look as on the pattern illustration. The only alteration I made was to raise the arm openings by 2 inches -- quite a lot but I wanted to be able to wear this without another shirt underneath. I wore it with just a cami under it for warmth today, and it was perfect, but there is still room for a t-shirt underneath if you'd wish to wear it that way as well.

The sewing was really straightforward, with attention to the slippy fabric of course. I sewed with a long and narrow zigzag, and went slowly to be sure there was no shifting. It was only when I had to sew the neck on with the fabric face up that I had any difficulty, but I switched to my plastic foot made for vinyl, pleather etc. and it slid over the pile lightly and smoothly.

The part of this top which took the longest was deciding how to hem it. I couldn't decide on what to do that would give a simple clean hem that didn't stretch or get wavy. I considered hand stitching but then looked up some tips online. The best one came from a PatternReview forum, which I then tried out on some scraps and liked. So ended up pinning carefully and then stitching a narrow zigzag on a single layer of once turned up hem -- I used a .5 width and 3.0 length zigzag stitch and it seemed to be quite effective.

I finished it this morning and wore it to work this afternoon. It's a great pattern, and using a soft velour knit like this one ensures that you are both comfortable and feel glamorous. Win-win!