Hello!

posted in: Sewing | 2

Hello. My name is June and I’m a jack of all trades….master of none. This is my zillionth blog and the second one dedicated to one of many hobbies. The other is cooking. I can’t promise that I will regularly update this blog because I have a 9 month old baby who takes up a lot of time but I can promise I will try.

To start this new blogging adventure, I’m going to introduce my latest creation McCall’s 5884. What attracted me to this pattern, aside from the $0.99 price tag, was the collar with tie ends. I have a …hhmm….odd body shape and this tie masquerades my belly very well. The deep V neck directs the eye towards my better assets and the balloon sleeves are cute.

I made two muslins of this blouse. Because of my body shape and significant size difference between my bust, waistline and hips, I always had to make adjustments. Sometimes I am a bit hasty and make these adjustments right off the bat without even trying a muslin on. This time it came back to bite me in the butt. The first muslin was absolutely horrendous. I tried to adjust to it to fit but it would have a taken a lot of work. I decided to try and cut the pattern only grading for the different sizes and not doing the round belly adjustment. What do you know?!?!?! The muslin fit like a charm! With the exception of the sleeves of course, I had to adjust those a bit to fit around my upper arm.

This is a fairly easy blouse to make. The most difficult part was actually cutting the collar pieces. They are huge and would not fit on my kitchen island cum cutting table so I cut them on the floor. I thought it would be fine to cut the end that didn’t fit on the cutting mat just on the floor and I screwed up my rotary cutter’s blade so I had to buy a new one. I was making this blouse for a cruise I went to this past weekend and I left a few things for the last minute. In my mad rush to finish it up, I accidentally cut a thread in center back collar seam and it was coming undone. I didn’t have time to take it apart and resew so I stitched over the entire seam with a decorative stitch. Desperate times call for desperate measures.

I did make a fairly big, although totally invisible, change. The neck actually has a deep slash below where the collar ties come away from the collar, if that makes any sense. After finishing the blouse I realized this was just too deep for my liking so I just sewed it close with invisible thread. This 100% hidden by the bow so it’s really no big deal. If I had realized this earlier I would have altered out the slash altogether. The neckline itself is deep enough that one one should have any trouble getting their heads through.

I would absolutely recommend this blouse to anyone. It’s very cute and it can be dressy or casual depending on the fabric used. I used a sky polyester charmeuse from www.fabric.com. I wore the blouse with jeans and a stunning pair of shoes for the last night of the cruise. It looked great and I felt great. It was totally worth the pain the butt that working with this fabric was.

2 Responses

  1. Patty

    Very pretty blouse and an inventive solution to an ‘oops’ moment! Welcome to the world of blogging!

  2. Mary J. Godbey

    June, your McCall’s 5884 blouse looks fantastic! The tie-end collar is a good move, especially for disguising the post-baby belly – I can totally relate. Also, I used the same fabric for a different project, so it’s great to see how it turned out for your blouse. Your experience adds a helpful perspective to my own patternmaking for fashion design endeavors.

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