When in a quilt shop in New York, you really don't have any choice but to buy the limited edition, bespoke printed yellow taxi quilting cotton they have on sale. It's just a fact. In fact, it's science.

 

So then you are faced with a conundrum - just what do you do with it? It's pretty amazing, so you have to do something FAST but with a fabric this note worthy you may end up looking a bit too much like...well...something you don't want to look like.

 

I could have made trousers, but that felt like it might be a bit much even for me, and then a thought struck me. Given how much I love my Betty Dress why don't I just make another one? Well the main reason was that I didn't have enough fabric, so there the idea for a peplum top arose.

 

The fit of the bodice of the Betty is lovely, and gave me hope that I might actually wear a top without a cardigan on to cover up my rather unshapely upper arms (the cut is very forgiving of the boob overhang area that I'm sure many of you are familiar with), so I thought I'd give it a go.

 

The Betty dress I made was great, but the back neckline tends to gape a bit (entirely my fault as I didn't bother to make a toile - too excited by pretty fabric!) so I adjusted the pattern slightly by cutting an inch off the centre back seam - that resulted in a great fit at the back that I'm really happy with.

 

To make the peplum I simply shortened the existing skirt by copying the pattern pieces onto brown paper and cutting them down to about 6 inches long. Brown parcel paper is, incidentally, a great alternative to pattern paper and I use it a lot.

 

That was really the only change, but this fabric required some SERIOUS pattern matching so let's just dwell on that for a bit...

 

As I mentioned in the manual page for Betty, a circle skirt (or indeed peplum) doesn't favour the strong one directional print.

 

Turns out taxis are a strong one directional print. Who knew?!

 

As you can see on the peplum in the photo below, the taxis are all sliding downhill towards the vertical plummet they hit at the back seam. Thankfully I didn't mind this at all (and in fact found it mildly hypnotic watching all those cars gradually and inevitably twisting to the vertical) but it's proof that the directional print ain't the friend of the circle skirt if you want everything the right way up. Thankfully, I'm not that picky and the idea was appealing enough that I wasn't prepared to abandon it for something as minor as anti gravity cars...