Two New Work Shirts

This week I finished up two projects that had been hanging out in my "to do" pile for a while, a shirt from the Hot Patterns Deco Vibe Neat and Sweet Blouse pattern and also a pleated T-shirt from a new pattern company, Salme.

First up, the Deco Vibe blouse:

This is one of the Vintage Hot Patterns.  It's been in my pattern stash for so long that I don't even know if I bought it as a "vintage" pattern...or just bought an original version when it came out.  I have been loving the tie neck blouses of late (as evidenced by the vast number of them sewn last year).

For this quick version, I made it using a floral charmeuse.  The fabric did present a couple of challenges...for one, the rolled hem on the sleeve made the hem very stiff...and as a result, it doesn't drape as well as it does in the illustration.

Second, the back is very full.  It is small at the hem, but it seems like there is too much fabric above the waist and it poufs out.  You can see that the shirt could stand to be wider at the hem, so it would not bind up on my hips.  Not that I am going to let that keep me from wearing it...I just tucked it in and went to work.

The pants are a pair from the "2009:  A Pants Odyssey," when I made somewhere in the neighborhood of 35 pairs of pants trying to figure out fit.  This is a pair that I hadn't been able to get into in a while but I kept them anyway.  Given weightless, I can fit back into them but you can see what has happened to the back leg due to the change in body shape.

Second, the Salme blouse:

I used a feather printed poly crepe from a local fabric store.  One of the things I found when I was sewing is that the front pattern piece, after all the pleats are sewn into it, is about an inch and a half shorter than the back piece.  I ended up trimming off the excess, but you can see when the shirt is on that it is just about as short as you would want it to be.  In fact, it's too short to tuck in.  I missed it when I made my muslin because I just folded out the pleats on my pattern piece and made the front flat...the front piece ended up shorter, but I just assumed that it was me not being precise with my folds in the pattern piece.  I make my patterns using soil separator cloth, so it's not like creasing a piece of paper.

Overall, it is a comfortable shirt.  I think in future iterations I will scale down the the neckline and shoulders to a smaller size and raise the armscyes.  You can't lift your arms to shoulder height without lifting the entire shirt, and normally that means that the armscye is too long, or the sleeve cap is too high.  In the meantime I will just not pick up anything above waist level.

I probably won't get anything done this weekend, because I am leaving on a trip for work tomorrow...to lovely Utah.  I keep trying to convince the administration that the campuses that REALLY need training are the ones in London and Vienna...but so far it's been Kansas, Utah, and Arkansas.