A good friend of mine takes great landscape photos so he supplied me with a beautiful photo of the Three Sisters (Blue Mountains in New South Wales) now used on this digital print fabric using Contrado.co.uk Using digital prints is addictive.

Choosing the fabric
When I was trawling through the fabrics available from Contrado, I chose this soft French crepe fabric to compliment the clouds around the landscape although I didn’t have a garment in mind. I wasn’t worried about what I would make from this fabric. I just knew this was too good an opportunity to be hamstrung by the next step of creating this into a garment.

Grace of Badmomgoodmom sent me a link to this post and I’m so glad she did. Grace is very knowledgeable about a lot of things so I was very grateful for her note.

Figuring out what to make
Once this fabric arrived in the post, I checked out the dimensions and handled it for feel, drape and if it crushed easily. It does crush but it’s so soft, flowy and irons perfectly.

I use time to reflect on my projects so I put this fabric aside and then I pattern stashed dived and came up with three patterns options – a semi-fitted sleeveless top, a flowy top and a flowy dress.

The flowy top is what I decided to use. It’s Victory Patterns Simone pattern from a few years ago and I picked up this pattern from a destash we did at Port Macquarie that Sewbusylizzie ran 2 years ago.

The ‘How-to’
The panel is 50cm long so I had to decide on what I would use to balance this print to be in the right place for me.

With all the inspiring lace skirts that were being made at Susan Khalje’s Sydney course, I found a lace remnant in my stash and a firm knit fabric to balance into this print.

The reviews for this pattern showed the front opening is quite low and on me, it felt uncomfortable so I raised it by 5cm.

This fabric is really soft, has a bit of stretch and is still a firm weave so it was easy to sew. I’ve used french seams on the sides.

Below is the work appropriate version Three Sisters digital print using Butterick 5608 using the third panel I ordered. The rest of this blouse uses a cream coloured rayon remnant for the sleeves and back.

Butterick 5608

With the heat and humidity we’ve had this Summer, I’m getting used to wearing flowy tops on weekend. I still need to wear shaped clothes so I think I can safely pair this with skinny jeans, or a fitted skirt or shorts.

Is that it?
I have one more digital printed fabric that I’ve made through Contrado UK that I’ll show you in a couple of weeks time. 

Now you’ve seen two out of three fabrics I’ve designed through Contrado and I feel this has been a great design journey.