In Tilly’s Make It Simple book, she has a pattern for a cardigan which is called the Bertha. It’s a slouchy raglan cardigan design, and it has dramatic batwing style sleeves. As soon as I saw it I thought “I need to make that!”, and so that is what I did.
1. The fabric
I bought a lovely recycled cotton knit fabric from Guthrie & Ghani in a wine colour that I thought would work well with this design. What I hadn’t realised was quite how much fluff it would produce during the sewing process! Because it is a loose chunky knit, there isn’t much to stop it from fraying and so I needed to be really careful. I pegged it up in my sewing room to keep it under control when I was sewing everything together.
To get around the fraying I decided to seal all the edges of each piece using bias binding before sewing, and handily I had some fabric scraps left over in a pretty tropical design so I made that into bias strips.
2. The pattern
The Bertha pattern is from Tilly’s Make It Simple book, and so it’s designed to be a quick and easy make. It has a few variations that you can do, including adding pockets which I was tempted by, but I didn’t have quite enough fabric so I just went with the simplest version of this cardigan.
3. The challenges
I found this quite straight forward to make, but cutting out the fabric was fiddly. I needed to be really careful to cut it out exactly in line with the grain because the chunky ribs were quite unforgiving. The bulk of the fabric was a bit of a pain as well, the cuffs in particular were quite tricky to fit through my sewing machine. For the cuffs the pattern suggests sewing them on and then overlocking the inside. I don’t own an overlocker, so I ended up sewing the outside seam on the machine, and then hand sewing the inside edge closed sealing in all the raw edges. I used the same process for the collar piece. Once I’d made it up I also found that the bias bound seams were flapping about and I decided to hand sew those down flat as well. So I did lots of hand sewing, which meant this took me a whole weekend to sew rather than the 2-3 hours that the book suggests!
4. The final result
This is a really comfortable cardigan that I know I’m going to wear so much this autumn and winter. It’s informal and perfect for those relaxing weekend days. I am really happy with how the bias bound seams have turned out – it looks quite good when worn inside out too!
The sewing resolution 