House Blouse

One of the patterns in that recent gigantic grab bag'o'patterns was McCall's 7956, a 1982 Laura Ashley shirt and jumper pattern.  Now, the jumper...no, it's not a thing I would wear, but the shirt looked intriguing, so I chose a print that Laura Ashley would very probably not have chosen and got started

Chose view B, with short sleeves, and also chose to omit all of the self ruffles, because I  felt like it would have been so busy that the ruffles on the collar would have been lost, and the ruffles on the sleeve band just...didn't seem right to me.  I did consider making the ruffles from lace, but, again, this print didn't seem suitable for that, either.

So, we end up with a very small collar!  I followed the instructions for applying it, which have you iron under the neckline seam allowance on the bottom/un-interfaced side, sew it right-sides together to the top/interfaced side, clip turn and press, then sew the collar top to the wrong side of the collar opening, flip it over so the seam allowances are inside the collar, then sew the ironed-under bottom collar to the neckline on the outside.  (They direct it to be hand sewn, but, pfft, ditch stitchin' it is.)  That's a new one for me.

If I make this pattern again, I'll probably use a calmer print and go ahead and use lace for the ruffles on the collar (probably still won't be convinced about the ruffles on the sleeve bands.)

This is not a calm print.  I've had it for a few years, and I still have more.

The pin tucks are not the most delicate, and actually do lend as much to the shaping of this shirt as they do to the decorative appearance.  Although this pattern is at least one size up from what I'd usually choose for a shirt, even a size or so down would probably still have been much looser than my usual silhouette.  Frankly, the shirt is almost as freeform as the jumper you're supposed to make from the rest of the pattern.

But!

I was determined to corral the volume a bit, so grabbed another shirt pattern and copied the darts to the back of this one...and then did that again...and again...

This did pull the side seams slightly to the back, and I might re-sew those side seams with a bit of shaping, but I topstitched those side seams (of course I did) and don't really feel like picking out that topstitching so things can be properly redone.

...and the only reason I'm not too keen right now on doing that is because I picked out, re-sewed, then picked out again some topstitching on the front, meant to anchor down the innermost edge of the fold over facing.  It had to go because things were off by a bit and that topstitching did not align properly with the pattern matching.  Couldn't have that.

You can see the holes from the defeated topstitching, if you know where to look.  I'm sure it will disappear after being washed.

I will admit, I am considering maybe making a jumper to wear over this...just...a jumper from a different pattern...