Peasant Tops

With two boys at home I don't have much opportunity to sew girly things.  Recently, however, it was my 12-year-old niece's birthday and I wanted to sew her something.  Not having any appropriate patterns and not really wanting to spend money on a pattern I wouldn't get much use out of, I decided to go with something simple but still fun and girly.  I decided to make a peasant top for her.



There are lots of tutorials on the internet for peasant tops, although many are for toddler sizes and most of the rest are for women's sizes.  This one from Pretty Prudent, is one of the better ones I found.  Once I got the general idea of the construction of the peasant top, what I really needed was a size chart to tell me how big to cut the pieces for a 12yo.  I found what I was looking for here.  Jamie from Trendy Treehouse created a size chart for peasant tops from size 0-3 months to 12 years!  Perfect!

I purchased some eyelet fabric from Fabric.com: a mint green solid and a white with  pink flower print.  The pink ended up being brighter than I expected from the photo on the website, but my niece likes bright colors so that was ok.  I basically followed the steps exactly as in the Pretty Prudent tutorial, except using the sizes from the Trendy Treehouse size chart and leaving off the elastic at the waist. I did not make an A-line shape for the top, just a straight rectangle, because the gathering at the top already creates plenty of fullness.

My 12yo niece has a baby sister and I had a good amount of the green eyelet fabric and some of the pink flower fabric leftover so I decided to make a peasant top for her as well.  For the baby's I reversed the fabrics, using the green as the main shirt color and the print for the sleeves.  I also decided to make her a pair of leggings using the free Go To Leggings pattern and some leftover Hacci Sweater knit I had from this sweater.  The bright pink in the eyelet fabric went perfectly with the hacci sweater knit.

It was kind of fun to work on something girly for a change, and these were really simple and quick items to make.