I wasn’t going to blog this latest Muresk top (others are blogged here) and then I thought it had a little story which deserved to be told, namely that this top is partly made from the ponte given to me by my lovely friend Hélène when we played together in Montréal and uses the scraps from the StyleArc Taylor skirt.  I added a small amount of floral ponte from Knitwit to supplement the original ponte and I have to say that I really love the combination.

It goes well (obviously) with the Taylor skirt and I feel that I’m wearing a suit without wearing a suit as the top and bottom coordinate so well.

I added 6.5 cm to the length of the top and feel that it’s much better at this length.

I also  treated the sleeves a little differently, giving them the peekaboo slot seam treatment, and I used the floral fabric for the contrast. The sleeves are really hard to photograph as that floral fabric remains well hidden most of the time – hence the peekaboo tag.

I posted this sleeve on Instagram recently for #sleevefest2017 and promised to show how to do it, so here goes with the tutorial part of the post.

Take your sleeve pattern and split it down the middle. Add a seam allowance to either side and cut out the four sleeve pieces. Now join those split seams back together with a combination of basting and regular length stitches. As an example you might do 2.5cm (1″) of basting, followed by 2.5cm of regular stitch, all the way down the seam. Then sew a strip of contrast fabric down either side of your seam, with the right side of the contrast fabric facing the wrong side of the sleeve.

I made my strip quite wide, and I can’t give a rational reason for this. I just sewed the edge to the seam allowance and later trimmed off the excess. It would have been much easier to make the strip a little narrower I think.

I then top stitched either side of the seam line and opened up the basting stitches.

The contrast fabric will peek through. Just make sure you tidy up all those threads!!

Just a comment: You can baste the whole way and make the contrast fabric much more obvious when the seam is opened up, but I like the peekaboo effect caused by the sections of regular stitching. I did think that the next time I do this, I would just use very short sections of regular stitching, so that my contrast fabric was a little more obvious,

I have to say that I love wearing this top with jeans

although I will admit that wearing jeans tucked into boots always makes me feel as though I’ve left my horse behind!

and this time I did a regular knit neckband as I wanted to make it look different from the others.

I wore this top to have a celebratory lunch with my lovely friend Tania for her birthday, although I don’t think she saw it because I didn’t take my coat off!

I still intend to make a dress from this pattern, but have decided to wait for summer and make it from lighter fabric.