This necktie is a no-no

I made this neck tie using the pattern in Gifts to Make Vol. 2 from the editors of CraftStylish. I used some of the fabric from my wedding (we bought some extra fabric that matched the bridesmaid dresses), planning to give it to my husband when I was done. A little useful memento of our wedding.

The real reason for making it was to find a decent pattern to make a tie for my dad out of some expensive fabric I had bought (not that the wedding fabric was cheap, but I still have a lot of it). However, this is not that pattern as there are many things wrong with it.

First, the pattern is wrong. If you lay it out as they have given it to you, your pieces will not match up properly. If you decide to use this pattern, be sure to flip over one of the two pieces before cutting. As a result, my tie is now about 4 inches short since I had to cut the diagonal the other way in order to make it fit together.

Second, I prefer my ties to have a nice mitered corner of the top fabric folding over to the back. This one has the liner fabric meet at the edge of the real fabric. Not so good. (You can see it from the front if you’re not careful. I guess that’s one reason to self-face with this pattern.) You can see I didn’t even bother to finish this tie by sewing up the ends because I’m not sure what I’m going to do with it.

Third, this pattern is way to thick in the center part which makes the knot. If you look at the picture of Minnie at the top, you’ll see the knot is very big. That’s because there’s a ton of fabric there. In the picture above, I’ve matched the bottoms of the two ties. Mine is on the bottom and one of hubby’s nice ties is on top. See how much narrower the nice one is for the part which makes the knot?

Needless to say I won’t be making this pattern again. One upside is that I was able to test the iron-in woven interfacing I’m hoping to use for my dad’s tie and that worked really well.

I’ve also reviewed this pattern on Pattern Review: my review.