Floral Tulips

 

Our girls have always been very 'girly' girls - loving wearing dresses and skirts, with frills and flounces in abundance.

Lately though the focus has switched a little and now there is a desire for more shorts in their summer wardrobe, so I hunted around and found a cute pattern on Etsy.

This is the Tulip Short by Cali Faye Collection.

It's a very sweet little short pattern that is (theoretically) reversible and has a loosely elasticised waist and button detail.

I say theoretically because I wonder how often anyone actually reverses a reversible garment.

While I love the final result, I had a few issues with this pattern which I am going to share below:

• I feel that the instructions are not written as well as they could be. The language could have described things more clearly by referring to the components as the 'short lining' and 'short outer' or 'main' so you know which pieces you are working with, particularly as it's not that clear from the pictures.

• The pattern suggested serging (overlocking) the seams for neatness, but as the shorts are fully lined there is absolutely no need to do that and had you done it you'd feel pretty annoyed at the waste of time at the end.

 

• Additionally, there was no pattern marking for the positioning of the buttons.The line drawing showed them to be positioned fairly low on the shorts, the finished product shot showed them to be higher up.  I placed them lower as I felt this resulted in a more modest look but, then found it left a strange crease across the front of the shorts and restricted my daughter's movement too much. The button placement should be marked on the pattern pieces because although they say it's optional I really don't think it is, as the shorts would just flap open without them.

• The instructions say not to scale the pattern - which is unusual for PDF's as you normally scale to 100%. When it was printed, the test box of 1 inch squared did not come to exactly one square inch - it was close - but not quite there - which had me doubting if I had done the right thing.

• My final complaint is that to make the size ten you had to print out four full pages each with the tiniest skerrick of pattern marked on them - such a waste of paper and time.  There was lots of room at the top of the pages where the main body of the pattern was placed - so if the pattern had been positioned better there would have been no need for this.

I guess I have become spoiled by the PDF patterns of Oliver +s who do them so beautifully, so now anything else seems like it is done badly!!

All that said I really like this pattern - and the other patterns in the Cali Faye shop are lovely designs - very modern and simple lines and I do intend to make more of them in the future.

The pattern itself is simple to make and the pieces all came together easily, they matched and were sized to fit each other really well.

        

I think it runs a little small - but I think US sizing might be a little smaller than Aus as the 8 is snug on Miss L and generally it would fit her fine as there's not much of her!

In moving the buttons and having her try them again I noticed a silly error I have made that would probably be affecting the fit slightly too - I have overlapped one side wrongly with the back flapping over the front piece!!

I have these cut out in a 10 and a 7 for her sisters and will have them whipped up soon to show you.

PATTERN:     Tulip Shorts

DESIGNER:   Cali Faye Collection from Esty

FABRIC:         Soft dark Chambray outer with floral cotton lining - both from stash

BUTTONS:     Self-covered buttons from Jackobindi