Pintuck tanks

I've been using the same self-drafted tank pattern (based on an LLBean tank I bought many years ago) to spice up my corporate-barbie wardrobe.  Lately I've used a lot of poly charmeuse for this, because it's  cheap yet dressy looking.  Recently, though, Fabric.com had an INSANE sale on their 100% silk charmeuse and I took the plunge.  I ordered three different fabrics (two jewel tones and one "hammered" gray).  One of the jeweltones was called "cinnamon"--who could resist that with holiday parties a-comin'!?  

The silks I purchased were regularly $30/yard, but on sale for $10.  I figured, even if I needed two yards for a tank, $20 was waaaaay better than buying a silk tank from Talbots for at least double that.  

Plus, I've always intended to one day make a garment with pintucks in it, but I never really had a vision of the final product.  Now, everything started to come together... 

 I made the ivory shirt with the same pattern using some poly charmeuse I had left over from another project.  I used that shirt as a dry-run for the cinnamon silk because I'd never really done a serious job of incorporating pintucks into a garment design before.








All I needed was a double needle and my pintuck foot to make this fancy design element.  I watched a couple of youtube videos on making pintucks before I started out, and the one helpful tip I picked up was to hold your fabric taut both in front of and behind the needle as you sew.  This kind of makes the fabric pop up between the ridges in your pintuck foot.

Here's a close up of the results; I'm not sure why the poly seemed to form more reliable tucks.  The silk was definitely easier to work with when it came to the bias binding, though.  The cinnamon silk is sooo hard to photograph!

As you can see, upon close inspection, the pintucks aren't perfect.  However, it doesn't much matter as the overall effect is more like a textured panel and the imperfections aren't noticeable.

Here's a parting shot:  my continuous bias binding and some kind of stay-iron-on-stuff that I used to stabilize the pintucks.  I measured the front of my pattern piece for the tank, then transferred that marking onto my un-cut fabric (plus an inch or two).  Then, I made all my pintucks (24 total for these garments).   After that, I folded my fabric, placed the front pattern piece for the tank onto the pintuck portion of the fabric, and cut it out.  Then I used the iron-on-stuff, plus a scrap piece of fabric, to stabilize (pintucks are a bit stretchy!) the neck line and hemline and to keep the pintucks from unraveling.  It worked really well!