Blouse assignment for school
It's been ages since I took the time for a dress diary and since I'm not busy at all with my final assignments for school, here it is. (I mean, I've got plenty of time for making a dress diary, since I only have to make a lined summer coat in a week. /sarcasm)
But muses come and go and after buying the initial fabrics and haberdashery, the journey didn't quite go as planned.
My inspiration picture was this, and these are the fabric and buttons I chose to make it with:
Cost of materials:
2 meters cotton: € 14,90
1 meter of skin-coloured interfacing because it's a semi-sheer fabric: € 9,50
15 buttons: € 2,70
Thread: € 3,40
Since I can't seem to post pictures from Pinterest here, I have shamelessly stolen this watermarked picture and uploaded it to Livejournal. Pinterest got it from Etsy, but I believe the watermark says EmbonpointVintage, so you can order the pattern there. I of course had to draft my own pattern because I'm freakishly tall and school teaches me the Rundschau method and wants to see me use it too. Here's the ¼ scale pattern:
Red lines are seams, green lines are facing.
While cutting out the pieces, I found that it was really hard to make the fabric stay put. Although it was 100% cotton, the fabric did not want to lie flat. But since it's a plaid fabric, you really need to watch the grainline! I tried my best, and finally cut out all the pattern pieces from single fabric. I matched the waistline over a white line and center front over a blue one.
The next hurdle was to sew everything together, but that also proved a challenge. The fabric was just hell to work with, so thin and crinkly, it was difficult to even match up the waistline stripes.
Worse, I had sent my blouse pattern to the teacher for checking and she said my sleeve was wrong: I had taken a measurement wrong and that resulted in a sleeve head that was too high. I had thought that because the sleeve was cut as one piece with the side-front panel, this would not be a problem, but it really was. The shoulder looked really weird and the sleeve just looked off.
And then there was that crinkly fabric. Now I knew it was a casual look, but this made me look just like I had stepped out of a dumpster.
After sighing and checking my stash for another fabric, I went back a few steps to square 2: using the new sleeve I had drafted for my pattern. You can see the difference between the two in the above picture: the new (correct) sleeve is on top, the old (wrong) sleeve is below. That's quite a difference, yo.
The fabric I still had in my stash was once bought for my mother. It was a stretchy cotton with a twist - literally: The stripes ran from selvedge to selvedge over the width of the fabric and the stretch ran down the length of the fabric. Still, no matter. Cotton is cotton and the stripes would work well for this model blouse. In the original the side panels were cut on the side, but I decided to let all the stripes go lengthwise. It makes for a nicer look at the back darts.
Working with those stripes (after being very careful and precise in my cutting!) made me squee with happiness sometimes.
Left: inside where the inside collar and outside collar meet. Right: back of collar.
The cuff of the sleeve was cut on the straight, making a nice edge to the bias-stripes of the sleeves.
And here's the finished product! I am very pleased!
I kept track of my progress. Thanks to some inaccuracies, I was busy for a bit longer than usual.
Cutting: 30 minutes
Interfacing and copying markings, first pinning: 45 minutes.
Stitching seams front: 15 minutes
Stitching collar and facings, stitching back panel: 2 hours
Ripping and re-stitching collar: 45 minutes.
Hem & cuff, topstitching: 45 minutes
Hem again, buttonholes: 1,5 hours.
------------
Total: 6,5 hours.
And for those of you who are wondering whether I was wise to toss out 15 euro of fabric and 10 euro of interfacing for some old stash cotton, here's the side-by-side comparison.
Look at how not sorry I am to be wearing this lovely, crease-free, perfectly fitting blouse!
Cross-posted to my journal
But muses come and go and after buying the initial fabrics and haberdashery, the journey didn't quite go as planned.
My inspiration picture was this, and these are the fabric and buttons I chose to make it with:
Cost of materials:
2 meters cotton: € 14,90
1 meter of skin-coloured interfacing because it's a semi-sheer fabric: € 9,50
15 buttons: € 2,70
Thread: € 3,40
Since I can't seem to post pictures from Pinterest here, I have shamelessly stolen this watermarked picture and uploaded it to Livejournal. Pinterest got it from Etsy, but I believe the watermark says EmbonpointVintage, so you can order the pattern there. I of course had to draft my own pattern because I'm freakishly tall and school teaches me the Rundschau method and wants to see me use it too. Here's the ¼ scale pattern:
Red lines are seams, green lines are facing.
While cutting out the pieces, I found that it was really hard to make the fabric stay put. Although it was 100% cotton, the fabric did not want to lie flat. But since it's a plaid fabric, you really need to watch the grainline! I tried my best, and finally cut out all the pattern pieces from single fabric. I matched the waistline over a white line and center front over a blue one.
The next hurdle was to sew everything together, but that also proved a challenge. The fabric was just hell to work with, so thin and crinkly, it was difficult to even match up the waistline stripes.
Worse, I had sent my blouse pattern to the teacher for checking and she said my sleeve was wrong: I had taken a measurement wrong and that resulted in a sleeve head that was too high. I had thought that because the sleeve was cut as one piece with the side-front panel, this would not be a problem, but it really was. The shoulder looked really weird and the sleeve just looked off.
And then there was that crinkly fabric. Now I knew it was a casual look, but this made me look just like I had stepped out of a dumpster.
After sighing and checking my stash for another fabric, I went back a few steps to square 2: using the new sleeve I had drafted for my pattern. You can see the difference between the two in the above picture: the new (correct) sleeve is on top, the old (wrong) sleeve is below. That's quite a difference, yo.
The fabric I still had in my stash was once bought for my mother. It was a stretchy cotton with a twist - literally: The stripes ran from selvedge to selvedge over the width of the fabric and the stretch ran down the length of the fabric. Still, no matter. Cotton is cotton and the stripes would work well for this model blouse. In the original the side panels were cut on the side, but I decided to let all the stripes go lengthwise. It makes for a nicer look at the back darts.
Working with those stripes (after being very careful and precise in my cutting!) made me squee with happiness sometimes.
Left: inside where the inside collar and outside collar meet. Right: back of collar.
The cuff of the sleeve was cut on the straight, making a nice edge to the bias-stripes of the sleeves.
And here's the finished product! I am very pleased!
I kept track of my progress. Thanks to some inaccuracies, I was busy for a bit longer than usual.
Cutting: 30 minutes
Interfacing and copying markings, first pinning: 45 minutes.
Stitching seams front: 15 minutes
Stitching collar and facings, stitching back panel: 2 hours
Ripping and re-stitching collar: 45 minutes.
Hem & cuff, topstitching: 45 minutes
Hem again, buttonholes: 1,5 hours.
------------
Total: 6,5 hours.
And for those of you who are wondering whether I was wise to toss out 15 euro of fabric and 10 euro of interfacing for some old stash cotton, here's the side-by-side comparison.
Look at how not sorry I am to be wearing this lovely, crease-free, perfectly fitting blouse!
Cross-posted to my journal