Color Blocking
Color blocking is the perfect technique to use to jazz up a basic pattern, especially if it’s a good fit and a style you love. The technique so often changes up the garment from boring to something stylishly fun or elegant.
This tutorial focuses on a basic oversized T-shirt pattern (see links below) that can easily be adjusted to produce hundreds of different looks. It's one of my favorite patterns; I basically live in this garment, both in summer and in winter.
Color blocking is just common sense, but for anyone who hasn’t attempted to alter a pattern before, the video below might be useful.
It’s also great for guys
Follow the tutorial below to make a simple T-shirt, that with a bit of practice, shouldn’t take you longer than fifteen minutes to complete.
T-shirt or tracksuit top
Printing your pattern
Print it out as A4 sheets using Adobe Reader in poster print mode. Select cut marks and tiling on the poster setting in Adobe Reader. Print out the top in your chosen size.
Stick the pattern pieces together at the cut marks using clear tape.
Notions
1m of stretch knit (jersey) fabric. Suitable fabrics are cotton knit, Bon Bon, Viscose Lycra
Sewing thread
Sewing needle for lightweight knit fabric
Ruler
Sewing machines, overlocker, cover stitch or plain machine.
Tailor’s chalk or magic pen
Printer
Scissors or rotary cutter
Cutting your T-shirt
Cut 1 back to the fold of the fabric (trim off the side slit if you don’t want one)
Cut 1 front to the fold
Cut 2 sleeves to the fold. (Trim the length if you want short sleeves. The long sleeved version must have a rib trim cuff if you’d like to have long sleeves).
Cut a length of binding to finish the neck area. Cut this to the width of your binder, mine is 4.2 cm. the binding should be cut along the selvedge of the fabric.
Sewing your T-shirt
- Sew the back to the front, right sides together at one shoulder.
- Sew the binding to the neck line leaving raw edges at the unsewn shoulder.
- Sew the open shoulder closed.
- Nick a mark in the top center of both sleeves.
- Pin this nick to the armhole edge, matching the nick to the shoulder seam.
- Sewn the sleeve in place, easing over the shoulder.
- Hem the sleeve edge, if it’s a short sleeve top.
- Sew the side seams together, continuing through the underarm.
- Hem the top
- If it’s a long sleeve top cut a ribbing 20cm wide and 60% of the length of the sleeve edge. Sew the side seam together and attach to the sleeve edge, stretching to fit.
- Press