Far too many white shirts, BWOF 09-2008-115

I am highly attracted to sew-a-longs. The idea of making things at the same time as other people, and chatting about it is very appealing to me. However, I had only a momentary joining-in twinge when I read about Barbara's Never too many white shirt project. This is no reflection on her excellent idea. I agree totally that most people benefit from white shirts, and that trying pattern fitting and construction techniques without colour changing distractions sounds rational and sensible.

I, however, am not only non-rational when it comes to sewing (long coat for the sub-tropics anyone?) but am complexion limited to non-white shades, am currently suffering from an excess of my white alternative shirts, plain - cream and beige.as I made a lot of these for my 2008 SWAP, and am completely bored with looking at them hanging in my wardrobe, let alone wearing or sewing them.
I am also not good at sewing plain things.
You can imagine how enthusiastic I was when my younger daughter called in sewing credit for month 2 of her visible floor project. She wanted a white shirt to wear to her upcoming holiday office job.
I offered her the entire stack of Burda magazines, which she pours over as soon as I get them, but the rotter darling one picked out a New Look pattern that I made at least a dozen times in the 1990's.

Who said teenagers were fashion forward?
Fortunately I did not feel at all limited by this choice, and when I laid it out and discovered that the alleged size 8 in the pattern would fit 2 elephants and a hippopotamus, I fell back on BWOF 09-2008-115, which I had already traced out in a size 34 (bonus!) (I reviewed it here when I made it for daughter the first).


I changed a few things to make the blouse less like her sister's (curved collar, back neck pleat, short sleeves). I was fairly sure that daughter the second would not notice the pattern substitution. I was right.








You can see that there was a terrible slight problem with the fitting, which would have something to do with the refusal of daughter the second to either be measured, or to try on the work in progress.
You may also notice that I will have to start doing a square shoulder adjustment for her. I had not thought that shoulders changed quite so much in the transition from child's to women's sizes. I find ages 11-14 quite difficult from both a purchased clothing, and from a sewing perspective. It is tricky to adjust both fitting, and style requirements.
The feature that my daughter particularly noticed about this blouse was the way that some ribbon trim and embroidery had leapt on to the blouse.

She was not pleased. She said that this blouse was quite pretty, but not what she asked for. She is right.
Apparently I still owe her a plain white blouse.
I may be joining Barbara's sew-a-long after all.