What was I thinking???

I know I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again. I LOVE Jalie patterns!!! When their new patterns came out earlier this year, I bought a bunch, including 3245–the Raglan Tee in regular and tunic lengths. I really wasn’t motivated to try this pattern until I saw what Two On Two Off did with it. I love this blog!! The author is sooo talented and her tunic was soooo cute. The minute I saw it, I knew what I would be making this weekend!!!

Since it’s been kinda cold here in Boonetowne, I wanted to make the tunic out of fleece. I had some double sided Polartec in navy. It’s very thick fabric with a velour side and a nappy shearling side. For some reason I thought that it would make a great tunic. This definitely goes in the what-in-the-hell-was-I-thinking-category. Here’s the fabric:

Very, very nappy. Such nappy fabric would definitely not make good binding, right? Right!

The pattern went together very easily, and I thought everything was good, but then I tried it on. Good Lord! The neck binding had taken on a life of it’s own. It was sticking straight up. If it had been wider, I could have made some sort of Elizabethan collar. No matter what I did, I could not make the binding lie flat. I guess neck bindings do not like to made out of double sided fleece. Duh! How did I not realize this would be a problem??? Here’s the out-of-control neck binding:

Pretty, right?? So there was no making this binding work. After three different tries and whole lot of cursing, I decided it was time for something different. So, I pulled out the hood pattern piece from Jalie 3132 and made myself a hood. Now I have a tunic with a hood:

Although, it’s not what I originally had in mind, it’s growing on me. I really did not want to be defeated by Jalie 3245. Next weekend, I’m going to try it again, but I am not going to use the double sided fleece. Lesson learned!! But really, why was that a lesson I needed to learn? How come I couldn’t just look at that very thick fabric and know that this nappy, shearling fleece was going to be a problem? It’s like when I let my mom give a Toni Home Perm when I was in 6th grade. I should have known how that was going to turn out just by looking at the pictures on the perm box. I had to sleep with my hair in curlers just to calm it down enough to go out in public. It took full a year and a half for that perm to lose strength. What was I thinking????