The “40s Meets 80s” Bolero

The Facts

Fabric: random sweatshirting that’s been hanging out in my stash for years. Origination unknown
Pattern: McCall 804
Year: 1940
Notions: none
Time to complete: about 1.5 hours
First worn: out for coffee with friends
Wear again? yep
Total cost: free!
Bump on the day of the photo: 40 weeks (and two days – officially ‘overdue’)

After a couple of week’s of maternity leave, aka hanging out on the couch with books and cats, my sewing mojo is finally starting to reappear. Yay! So, for the first time in over a month, here’s a Sew Weekly challenge creation.

This week’s theme is ‘polka dots’. I love polka dots – I just find them super cute, don’t you?

I’m not sure where this fabric came from originally – it’s been lurking in my stash for years. I suspect it may have been part of my mother’s stash ages ago? My guess is that it hails from the 1980’s, that decade of crazy printed sweat shirting fabrics. (Hence the name for this garment.) There was roughly a metre left, in an odd shape due to whatever had been cut out of it previously. Which meant there was the perfect amount to make up another version of McCall 804. (This is the third time I’ve made up this pattern – previous incarnations were the 40’s Tartan bolero and the Bookclub bolero. I never would have guessed a bolero pattern from 1940 would become one of my go-to patterns, but hey, turns out it has! I’ll be using it again in the future as well – one day I’m going to make up the collared variant.)

Since it’s made out of sweat shirting fabric, I didn’t bother to line the bolero this time, or even use facings. I just did a basic overlock then stitch under around all the edges – anything else seemed like it would be overkill for this bolero. Which meant it was super fast to put together – about 1.5 hours all up from start to wearing.

It had it’s first outing to Rata Cafe on Sunday, for coffee with friends. Rata Cafe is up near Zealandia (a native bush and wildlife reserve), so we grabbed some photos with pretty native bush in the background. (And me squinting into the sun a bit, as it turns out. Not sure how I managed to not notice that while we were taking the photos…. Gah.)