For quite a while, I’ve been trying to find a replacement for a red and white spotty blouse that I wore until it fell apart.  I bought it several years ago, and I can’t remember where from.  The fit was great and it worked perfectly with my jeans and cowboy boots as a comfy rock ‘n’ roll outfit for gigging in.  This is the main reason that I have restarted sewing.  Although I had never made a blouse before, I was desperate to replace it.

Most of my sewing to date had been in straight lines, but in order to reproduce my much loved blouse I now had to tackle princess seams, a collar with collar stand, button holes and gathered sleeves.  If I’d thought about this carefully before ordering the fabric and McCalls pattern M6036, I don’t think I would’ve bothered.

In the end, I’m very pleased that I did bother.  It took me 25 hours from the opening of the pattern to the pinking of the seams, which is outrageous.  But I won’t have to trace and cut out the pattern again, and I have found a very helpful princess seam tutorial on YouTube that will speed things up next time too.  I was initially convinced that the princess seam pieces didn’t fit each other by about 2 inches.  I also won’t need to spend an hour figuring out how to create button holes manually on my mum’s old brother sewing machine – it’s simple when you know how.

I used size 22, with the D cup from the pattern with no adjustments and it fit pretty much perfectly.  I have quite a short body, so I was surprised that it wasn’t too long.  One of the things that I loved about making my own blouse, was being able to make sure that the button placement was conducive to preserving my modesty.

Making the collar and collar stand was really exciting, and I was very pleased with the ‘pointiness’ of the collar.  The hand sewing needed to finish the collar stand was a nice change of pace too.  And I love gathering! Doing the sleeves and getting them even was a real joy.

Overall, this was a great way to spend three days (although not all at once), and I have a fabulous blouse to show for my efforts.  That makes me very happy.

What was the first item of clothing you made?

Jx