Hello friends!  I’m back to blogging after a bit of a break consisting of a couple of cross country trips, life decisions and moving.  Now that we’re a little more settled, I’m excited to share this new Banksia tee!  Isn’t the fabric stunning?!

Speaking of the fabric, it’s from an Etsy shop in India, Fibers to Fabric.  The prints they have are all sooooo pretty, unique, and colorful.  This particular fabric is mill printed, but there’s a bunch of hand stamped prints available as well (I may also have one of those almost sewn up…).  This one is 100% cotton, but it’s fairly lightweight so it hangs decently well for a cut like this and isn’t too stiff.  It will actually be nice and cool once it gets hot here!

The pattern is a Megan Nielsen Banksia, which I’ve actually sewn twice before – but didn’t blog.  Whoops.  If you’re an astute follower on Instagram, you’d have seen them both (follow me!). 😉  I made the other two with rayon challis, so definitely much more flowy.  The best thing – for me – about Megan Nielsen patterns is that they are drafted for a taller figure, I believe 5’9″.  I’m 5’8″ and was pleasantly surprised to find this top fit perfectly well out of the box when I first sewed it up.  For this cotton iteration, I did add 1″ in length just for personal preference.  The upper back is a little tight, I think because the cotton has no give at all.  If you’ve read any of my other posts, I continually deal with tops being tight in the upper back.  Since I didn’t have this issue with my rayon challis versions, I didn’t modify for it for this one.  It’s very minimal though, likely because it was drafted for a taller person in the first place.

The neckline is finished with a bias facing.  There’s options for a peter pan collar, which I did before, and a placket, which you can see I did do here as well.  I’m a fan of the placket method in the instructions, because it does yield a pretty clean result with minimal frustration.  Personally, I still fear and hate plackets so this means a lot!

I can’t get over the lovely border print!  I am a little sad though because I wasn’t able to fit the sleeve edges on the border as well, which was my original plan.  I think that would have been a nice design element, but they work just as well as I ended up doing them.

Next time I will be showing you what I did with my hand stamped printed piece, which I’m super excited about!  Hint: I added a zipper mod to a pattern and I love how it turned out. 🙂

PS. Now that I’ve sewn up this piece, maybe now I will have the nerve to cut into my stash of fabric I bought when I was in India myself almost two years ago now…

Elisabeth