Today, I’m sharing one of my latest makes and probably the most fun thing I’ve sewn in a long time. It’s a very short robe with cropped sleeves made in VINTAGE. ANIMAL PRINT! fabric. I can fully imagine myself at a 1960s backyard barbecue drinking a mai tai and eating a hot dog. Either that, or I’m hanging out in Bedrock with the Flinstones. I’ve been calling this a pool robe but I don’t really know if that’s a thing. I imagine a pool robe to be cropped and fun and this definitely fits the bill.
The pattern for this robe is my draft-it-yourself Tasi Robe/Jacket. In case you’re not familiar, this draft-it-yourself pattern walks you through each step of designing and drafting your own custom fit pattern. You choose the proportions you’d like and we give you the formulas to draft all the pattern pieces. Because you’re starting from scratch, you can make this garment in any size you like for any human body. If you’re not up for doing the calculations yourself, or just want to double check the math, we’ve created a spreadsheet calculator that does the work for you.
View A is a classic robe with patch pockets, a tie belt and carriers. View B is a casual jacket with turned back cuffs, oversized pockets and a hem band. It’s easy to adjust the design of this pattern to suit your personal preferences and we even give you a few ideas for ways you can customize and adapt this pattern.
For this robe, I was limited on fabric so I made it as short as possible and eliminated the sleeve cuff. I’m 5’11” and I made the robe just 36” long. One thing that I love about the Tasi is that you can not only customize the fit to your preferences, you can also adjust the ease and length to make it work for however much fabric you have on hand. I have a blog post where I show how to use the draft-it-yourself pattern and I show how I use Illustrator to test if a pattern will fit on a particular length of fabric. Check out that post here. (Note, the videos are password protected for people who’ve bought the pattern because the video essentially shows the entire pattern.)
The Tasi sewalong has a lot of helpful posts including tips for designing your custom robe or jacket and seam finishes that will make your robe feel extra luxurious. You can check out the entire sewalong here.
The pattern instructs you to hand finish the neckband, hem and sleeve cuffs but there was no way that I was going to hand stitch terry cloth. It would have been too challenging to do and not really worth it. To reduce bulk and save fabric, I used the selvage edge of my fabric along the neck band. Instead of tucking that edge in, I let it hang out, covering the seam of the neck band and body and top stitched it in place.
The fabric is definitely the star of this garment. Years ago, I was visiting my great-aunt in Santa Barbara and before I left, she pulled this fabric out of closet and gave it to me. She had bought the fabric decades earlier to make matching robes for herself and her husband but as things so often go, she never got around to sewing them. She still had the robe patterns too. I think the patterns are in my stash somewhere too.
This fabric is a terry cloth, like you use for towels or robes and it has this amazing animal print (tiger-ish I think?). Generally, animal prints are not really my style but I think this robe is so fun and cute. I did do a little google searching for a similar fabric but sadly couldn’t find anything currently for sale. It’s definitely a unique fabric and I’m really glad that I could make something with it.
I really love this robe so much and have a lot of fun wearing it. I also love that this robe has finally made great-aunt Miriam’s animal print vision come alive. I hope that she would think I honored her vision well and not think that it was too short to be decent. :)
You can get your copy of the Tasi pattern here and make sure to check out the sewalong too. Happy sewing!
