Meet Alani – the perfect coordinating set! Alani is a woven, two-piece set, brand new to our Resort Collection. These woven sets are perfect for summer, and Alani is packed with options to take you through the whole year – shorts, cropped, or full length pants, and dolman style short or 3/4 sleeve collared shirt. And, guess what? It. Has. Pockets. Pockets! Get your flowy woven fabrics ready for an Alani summer!

Getting Started

Before you purchase your patterns, there is a ton of helpful beginner information between the M4M and P4P blogs, in case you are new to knits, or new to PDF patterns in general:

• New to PDF patterns? Check out our helpful tips here.
• New to sewing with wovens? Check out Wovens 101.
• Not quite sure how to measure yourself accurately? Don’t worry; check out the post here!
• Having issues printing? Most issues can be resolved by using our FAQs/troubleshooting tips
• Join our Facebook group here.

Choosing Your Options

We have lots of tester photos in our FB group and on the site if you want to see a variety of photos of each option before you decide! Here is a quick snapshot of the different options:

Fabric + Notions

Alani is drafted for woven fabrics with a nice drape. Think about double gauze, linen and linen blends, rayon challis, voile, etc. Quilting cotton and other “stiff” wovens will work per se, but they will not drape as nicely as you might hope.

You will also need:

• Lightweight fusible interfacing
• 10-13 mm buttons
• Optional: fray check

Styling Alani

Alani is versatile enough to be dressed up or down. Tie it in the front for a more fitted look, pair Bryn or Kali with the Alani shorts, wear it as a swim coverup set, or more!

Now I’m ready to sew up ALL the Alani sets and take myself on vacation. I need that ivory set that Megan’s daughter has. It’s a must; I especially love it tied up in the front!

Alani Hacks

We have a few simple hacks for the Alani set, if you’re looking to make several for vacation and want slightly different looks for each one.

Cropped Hack

Crop tops are everywhere now, right?  If you’re looking to stay bang on trend then there is a super easy hack for the new Alani top that has you covered.

The first thing you will need to decide is how much length you want to remove from the shirt, and there are two ways to do this.

Option 1) If you have already made an Alani in the full length then the easiest thing to do is to pop it on and stand in front of a mirror, then place a pin in the front centre where you would like the shirt to finish.  Take the shirt off and measure up from the hem to decide how much to take off.  Don’t forget that you will need to add some hem allowance back on!  So, for example if you decide to remove 8.25″ then you will need to only remove 7.75″ from the bottom of the pattern piece to allow for the 1/2″ hem.

Option 2) The other method is to measure yourself to decide where you would like the shirt to finish.  Normally I would suggest measuring from the under arm to the hem, but with a ‘grown-on’ sleeve like this that isn’t going to work.  I chose to measure down from the top of the shoulder seam at the base of my neck, over the bust to the hem.  That gave me 20.5″. I took that back to my front pattern piece and added 1/2″ for the shoulder seam allowance that is already included in the pattern piece and 1/2″ for the hem allowance and marked that measurement of 21.5″.

I then measured up from the hem to that mark and got 8.25″.  I took that 8.25″ off the bottom of both the front and the back pattern pieces.

Here is my finished front piece with the length taken off.

 

Now, you could choose to curve the hem here if you wanted to as the style of shirt means that the side seams hang down further than the centre front and back, but I felt that the overall look of the outfit, which is a simple, breezy style just didn’t warrant it, so I chopped it straight across.

 

Then you just construct everything else as normal.  The only other things to be aware of are that I had originally chosen the 3/4 length sleeve, but once I made it up I felt that it looked odd that the sleeves were longer than the shirt, so I shortened them back to the short length.  Also be sure to mark your sleeve hems because the sleeve hems and bottom hems look almost the same length when constructing the cropped shirt, and it would be easy to sew the wrong bits together!

I hope you enjoy your new Alani set. It’s just so perfect for a lazy summer. In fact I liked mine so much I made another!

Happy sewing!

Dana xx

Dress Hack

Cathryn made such a cute dress hack for the Alani top! Simply lengthen the top to your desired length, and utilize the hem angle from the shorts. For an easy breezy look, wear it unbelted; or, you can sew up a simple coordinating sash for a different look. Of course, you’ll need a bit of additional fabric, interfacing, and a few more buttons, but otherwise, nothing additional is required.

 

Don’t forget to share with us on your favorite social media platform – we can’t wait to see where you take Alani.

#alanipattern #resortcollection #madeformermaids