The “Trap Crop”

Crop tops: all the rage.  (Not groundbreaking, obv.)  But the weird thing is, I’m actually into it.  Not in the Urban-Outfitters-thinks-its-1994-all-over-again kind of way.  But crop tops turn out to be the perfect companion to high-waisted bottoms when its too hot (or you’re too lazy) to have a bunch of unnecessary extra fabric to have to tuck in.  Love high waisted bottoms + hate tucking in = crop top.

Now, your traditional crop top is generally not appropriate for 99.9% of public situations that I find myself in, so I wasn’t really exploiting the crop + high-waisted opportunity to its fullest potential for the bulk of the summer.  UNTIL…. until I found this fantastic trapeze crop top at a teeny-bopper mall store back in June.  It’s perfectly cropped to graze the waistband of my high-waisted bottoms and gives me some air ventilation up under the trapeze part, but it looks & feels totally full-coverage.  I love(d) this trapeze top and started wearing it everywhere: work, the lake, weekend errands, out at night, and accidentally sleeping over on my friend’s sofa covered in dog hair.  And then one day, I was wearing the top at work and realized half way through the day that I smelled eerily like sunscreen…. because I had worn the top to the pool that weekend with no time for washing.  Too far.  I had gone too far.  I was trying to pull off stretch jersey in a business casual corporate setting, and it was clearly not working out.  I still loved the original, but I really did need a trapeze crop top for the work setting (NEED!), so, I said something that my grandma always used to say when I was growing up: “I betcha I could make that!”  [Cue some sort of inspirational Rocky music or something.]

Luckily, I still had my mom’s sewing machine on hand, which I had borrowed for a party decor project earlier this year.  I went to the fabric store with no clue what I was looking for, and found some decently thick, black, sort-of-stretchy fabric with the slightest bit of sheen to it.  $10 a yard.  (I wish I had written down the info from the bolt, like, what the hell it is I bought, whether it’s washable, etc, but whatevs, I was in a hurry, I think it said rayon…)

I figured I could make a copy of the Trap Crop (proper name) by tracing the outline of the shirt onto the new fabric and cutting it out.  Unfortunately, the thick, stretchy, shiny features of the fabric did not take well to marking with a white pencil, and I didn’t have any chalk on hand.  I realized that I had some left-over tissue paper literally laying on my living room floor, so I traced my Trap Crop onto the tissue paper with a pencil, adding a bit of “extra” on the edges for a totally unscientific seam allowance.  I used the paper as a pattern to cut out the front and back panels of the Crop from my fabric, and pinned and then sewed together the side and shoulder seams.

Then I Googled to try to figure out how to finish the hem, arm, and neck holes.  I do not recommend this.  A real seamstress would absolutely know what she is going to do, and how, before cutting the first slice of fabric.  However, I am not a seamstress, and I went with a more impromptu approach.  I ended up cutting bias tape strips out of the same fabric and using those to finish off the edges of garment.  I used the bias tape for the bottom hem too, but I probably didn’t need to.

I didn’t have a fancy bias tape folder thing that all of the “vloggers” were using, and the idea of folding tiny slivers of fabric in on themselves seemed incredibly daunting, so I left the inside edge of the bias tape unfinished.  This worked out OK, only because this fabric doesn’t fray much, but I’ve worn the top twice now and it’s starting to drive me BONKERS.  (I have since ordered the fancy bias tape tool from JoAnn’s, but I’m concerned about how well it will work with fabric like the one I chose here that doesn’t crease well — more to come.)  But all in all, I love my new Trap Crop!  

(shorts: Zara faux leather, shoes: Stuart Weitzman, necklace: Madewell, bag: Gap (or “The Gap”?), wine: delish)

And, the real news is that I have been sufficiently inspired and reassured by the fact that a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants project like this could result in a wearable shirt for approx. $10 worth of materials, that I’ve decided to try to sew more clothing items and document it here.  I’ll probably end up making a few items from purchased patterns, but I also bought a used design school book on pattern-making from Amazon and am hoping to be able to make my own patterns from ideas or clothes I already own.  Next up, I think, will be a shift dress out of the left-over fabric from the Trap Crop.  Wish me luck!