Sewing an Eyelet Tank Top for Fall: Sewing & Alteration Tips

Happy fall, dear friends! We are finally having some cooler weather (at least in the mornings) and I am taking full advantage of it to do some sewing. I was watching YouTube recently, and I spied the cutest tank top worn by the mother of one of my favorite château channel’s owner. I had to copy it!!!

The owner of the château is an English woman named Stephanie who co-owns with a couple of friends (they helped her buy it 20 years ago now) ~ The Château de Lalande. This is a place you can go to retreats and stay; I would really love to go… I can’t even tell you when I found their channel, but I have adopted Stephanie’s mother and step-father as my own, lol!

Her mother is French and is so often called “Mummy” that I can’t even tell you her real name! She lives with her husband Percy over on the coast of South Africa, but they often fly over to France for extended stays. A friend Gerry, who is like an uncle and who is Stephanie’s godfather, often stays, too. Really fun program to watch as the people who live there and take care of the castle are all lovely. They are all bringing this beautiful castle back to life!

Here I have paused and photographed this particular vlog’s opening as Mummy and Percy feature in it. Mummy is wearing the very top I like and this was a perfect way to share this cute blouse with y’all!

Creating an up-to-date pattern from a 1980’s vintage one in my collection

Here is me in the finished top so you can see how it turned out upfront. I am so thankful that I had this pattern still in my stash; I made my mother a blue-plaid jumper out this McCall’s 3578 (second dress from the right, but left unbelted) one Christmas when I was working for Suburban Yardage in Sacramento (since closed), back when I was ages 20-22.

This is the only larger pattern that I own, lol! I did have to alter it, plus use the French curve to redraw the armholes and to recurve the neckline. I wanted this blouse to hang loosely and drape softly, and it will with many wearings. 🙂

Very happy with how it turned out, but let me show you what you can do when you are sewing and need to reshape a pattern:

Here I make a boo-boo…

Re-curving the neckline similarly to the inspiration top was fairly easy using the French curve. I had to guess by just looking at the video and seeing how it hung on Stephanie’s mother.

I realized too late that the line I cut should have been the sewing line… I didn’t think about that until after I had made the cut…(what you see in the upper part that I was starting to draw on the fabric). It just narrows the shoulder seam, which I had wanted to keep wider as I have narrow shoulders. (eye roll)

Well, I was not going back to the store to buy more fabric to remake the front, and the neckline was still high enough.

Sometimes “creating” doesn’t go to plan and you have to remake a piece or just live with your mistakes. 😉

The remedy here is to roll your facing into a final hand-stitched seam, which worked out for the better anyway!

This older pattern would have me creating a lined neck and armhole facings and tacking them to the shoulder seams inside. They are a pain as you have to constantly iron them flat after washing, so rolling worked out better on the collar. For the armholes, I did leave them as they were and tacked them at the shoulder and sideseams.

The originial facing pieces I did not have to alter at all, for the collar pieces or for the armhole fronts and backs, as this material has a lot of “give” when cut on the bias.

For your lining fabric, use something with the same “weight” of your front fabric. I used some old dotted Swiss fabric from my stash. Great to use up old fabrics from leftover projects!

Style Tips:

• Sew any lining pieces by machine basting to the underside of each main fabric piece before sewing parts together. Nothing moves then making it easier to stitch.
• Remember to sew ALWAYS SEW UPWARDS or DOWNWARDS ~ sew facings together, drape and pin to the front/back in one piece, then sew. Whichever way you sew determines how the “pull” will be on the collar. “Sewing downwards” pulls everything towards the middle front and middle back of your garment. I prefer to sew upwards. This means you will sew four different seams, flipping half-way through each side of the garment ~ sewing across the very front and back twice. This creates a nice collar. My Creative Clothing instructor in college taught me this trick.
• For side seams, SEW DOWNWARDS ONLY. I cannot stress this enough to beginning sewers. If you ever buy a shirt which feels “wrong,” it is usually because someone at the factory where it was made sewed one sideseam upwards and the other side downwards. It feels horrible when worn! This goes for sewing hems, too, and you will find this on anything that “pulls in a circle” around a t-shirt. Take the shirt back or throw it out. 🙂
• Do grade your seam allowance after sewing the front to the back to get rid of the bulk when sewing the neckline in a roll. Also, cut the facing fabric down by half, then turn two 1/4″ turns and hand stitch closed. *** With hand-stitching, because you can stitch looser than a machine can, you can stitch from one shoulder side to the other and it won’t have that weird pull as in machine stitching.

***An aside, in this particular episode, Mummy and Percy were outside taking down sheets from the laundry line and Stephanie and Mummy were giving poor Percy a lesson on how to fold sheets…

I laugh a lot when watching all that goes on with the whole crew! Their dinner parties are fabulous, btw, and Phillip, Stephanie’s fiancé is sweet… And the china patterns… Swoon!!!

Finishing the side seam & hemline

Because eyelet and the dotted Swiss are both fabrics which tend to unravel, I used French Seams on most of the seams I needed to sew ~ except the shoulder seams, which I sewed as the normal flat-felled seam. 🙂

Here you can see I needed to add fabric to the back lining piece (as it was a previously cut out, leftover piece of fabric from another long-ago sewing project).

For extra give around the tummy on us older women, just create an open-turned seam (shown in photo, above) at the bottom of your garment. I stopped sewing the side seams and created this “slit” about 4″ in length.

After this, I turned up the bottom hemline 1/4″ and the final 1.5″ and sewed the hemline by machine using the same method used in stitching the front and back collar line.

If you hand-stitch the hemline, you can sew continuously as you can create the “give” it needs to lay correctly when worn.

Widening an armhole

For this pattern, I cut the original armhole curve, but on me it was a little tight. Here is the trick to fix that without making the shoulder too small on the front side:

• Use the French Curve and put the Zero (0) on the side seam.
• Look at the markings for either the front or back and this will be your cut-line.
• Lightly draw the new cutting line on your fabric, and cut this AFTER sewing a new basting line to hold the lining and face-fabric together. I moved my new cutting line down only 1/2″ to start. Mark the back the front/back the same way using its arrow-marked line which shows its correct curvature. ) I literally figured this out here using this pattern!
• Baste linings to each piece. Cut this new line around the underside of each armhole.
• Try on the garment for fit, re-align and re-cut as necessary.
• Sew on facings, re-cutting them if needed. Most of the time you won’t have to as they will stretch enough. 😉

Here I have re-cut both armholes and am putting them together to see if the curves match ~ and they do. 😉

Pin on the armhole facings and sew downwards from the shoulder to underarm for each front and back edge (four seams), press armhole facing upwards and towards the inside.

Turn-under outer edge of facing, and sew 1/4″ to the wrong side, down from each shoulder side as before.

Press armhole facing under and hand-stitch to shoulder and side seams. Top-stitch 1/4″ away from armhole edge to finish (again, sewing downwards).

And here is the finished eyelet blouse! Ready to wear out as is while hot and under jackets and cardigans for a little more warmth as the weather turns cooler. Let me know what you think of this sewing tutorial.

Other sewing projects you might like:

• Crafts to Make ~ A French Toile de Jouy Dog Bed
• Father’s Day Sewing ~ Upcycling Hubby’s L/S Shirts into Short Sleeved Shirts
• Make It ~ A Little Quilt for Baby

I know I write a lot when I post these blogs, but for brand-new sewists, there are a lot of tricks to learn to make a garment feel good when put on, and that we always want! Please leave me a comment as I’d love to hear what fun things you have created this year and in the past.

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Happy sewing, friends,