When I made my tunic that I wrote about in the last post, I first made a quick version in thrifted fabric to make sure that it would fit and I would like how it looked on me before I cut into my nice fabric.  Last week I made this top for Anne without any trial runs and quickly regretted that hasty decision!  

Hopefully you are thinking- what is she talking about??  It looks fine!  And it did turn out fine but I had to think of Tim Gunn telling me "make it worrrk!"  since I made some silly errors at first.  I used the Dearmykids pattern that I used to make this shirt about 18 months ago.  I knew the size 4T wouldn't be big enough for Anne now so I enlarged the top piece and added more width to the bottom.  Well it turned out HUGE!  Like she wouldn't be able to wear this for about 3 years.  I should have printed out the correct pattern size and gone from there but I didn't want to bother with having to get new ink for my printer!  The pattern is awesome but it prints on like 20 sheets of paper.

This beautiful AMH voile does not like to be seam ripped.  Especially after you happily serged all the seams so proudly thinking you are making the cutest tunic for your daughter ever.  After I put it aside for a few days and felt bad about ruining this expensive fabric, I had the idea to add ruching to the arm pits.  Yeah!!  This was a great- although not perfect, solution since the top parts still gapes open on her a bit.

In the picture of the back above, you can see the ruching a bit better. It looks nice her and hopefully I'll post a picture of her in it later this spring/ summer.  Lessons learned: don't just wing it on expensive fabric AND if you ignore that first lesson, set it aside until you come up with a solution to fix up your errors of overconfidence!  Maybe someday you will make a shirt way to big for your child and remember this trick and it will be a help!  Do you have a fix it trick that has helped you out of a similar mistake?  I need all the help I can get 🙂