A Perfectly Imperfect Bowline Sweater

I'm generally a pretty practical person when it comes to deciding what to sew, but every once in a while I see something that I just know that I need want to make.  That's exactly how I felt when I first saw the Bowline Sweater from Papercut Patterns.  It was such a unique design, but it also seemed to be something that I would actually wear a lot.  After deciding that this pattern was next up in my queue I went on a search for the perfect jersey and ended up finding this one at Drygoods Design (with juuuust enough left on the roll to make this top).

I'd forgotten, however, how much I hate laying out jersey fabric so I ended up having to cut out some pieces more than once since I couldn't get the grain right.  Then, once I sewed up 90% of the shirt, I had a minor freak out moment thinking that I had totally screwed up the grainline when I saw that half of the stripes on the front of the shirt were running diagonal  Fortunately, I was able to look at other folk's finished products to see that this is because of the design and not because of my utter impatience when laying out jersey.

I was actually pretty pleased with how everything came together...until the very last step of sewing down the front pleat.  For the life of me, I couldn't figure out what they were telling me to do and I'm 99 percent sure that I ended up doing it wrong, but I like to tell myself that it's such an abstract top that it doesn't matter all that much.

It's perfectly imperfect.