Sew Americana 2019

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Welcome to the Sew Americana blog tour hosted by Katy from Wild and Wonderful. This is the fourth year for the blog tour, but the first one for me. There are a great line up of bloggers for the tour so follow along all week to see lots of red, white, and blue inspiration!

Sly Fox Fabrics was gracious to sponsor the tour, giving us 2 yards of fabric from the Americana collection. And my order arrived super fast! Thank you Katy Kemper and crew! As a military family and typical red, white, and blue fan, I was surprised by the selection of different shades of blue, grey, aqua, and heathered choices. When I chose my fabrics, I didn’t have a set plan as to what patterns I wanted to use, so I waffled quite a bit before choosing a yard of heavy Ponte de Roma in navy for my bottoms and a yard of the gorgeous Hideaway Floral in Blue for my top. The Ponte is surprisingly soft and lovely to work with!

I would have loved to sew something for our handsome 18 year old son for the tour, but with him going off to college in August, I knew he would say he doesn’t need any more clothes. Bummer! So you just get me instead. No worries though, if you follow along all week, there will be cute babies and lots of awesome red, white, and blue projects!

My shorts are the Aviator Pants from Winter Wear Designs heavily modified into shorts this time. They were blogged here when I made (and modified) them to be casual joggers. Since all the fitting to me was done, they were very fast and easy to sew, especially since I skipped the pockets too! There was only a bit of struggling to stretch the Ponte waistband onto the shorts. Once it was sewn on, it fit perfectly fine. And guess what!!! They are on sale for only $5 with the code SewAmericana! You can find them here! Code is good for a week – that will be a July 4th end date so don’t hesitate! Thank you Suzanne!

Deciding on a top took a lot longer than it should have. I wanted to pick just the right style to showcase the beautiful fabric (and a bit scared to cut it at the same time)! My husband wanted me to sew a dress which I wear a lot of during the summer, but I didn’t want to use ALL of my beautiful fabric on one item. So my thought was to make a top and use the leftover fabric to make the bodice of a dress with a coordinating skirt attached at a later time. After taking so long to decide, I had to go with something pretty fast to sew as I wanted to be prepared well ahead of my scheduled day. When the Taylor Tank testing call from 5 out of 4 Patterns came out, I knew that it was the top meant to be for the tour. It would give me a deadline and the push I needed to have my sewing done early! The coordinating fabric I used for the bands and back yoke is from SAS Fabrics in Phoenix and has been in my stash for a while.

My new Taylor Tank also looks great with jeans!

Oh, and since my first Taylor is also red, white, and blue, I will show that one too! The red stripes are an up-cycled men’s t-shirt and the blue is another fabric from my stash.

I’m wearing this one with a Shenanigans Skort from 5 out of 4.

For reference, my Taylor Tanks are size XS with size S length on the straps in front. The pattern is on sale for a new release price of $7.95 until Sunday, June 30!