The blouse that wasn't and Burda Style 09-2011-128 turned into a tunic

With 1.1m of lovely printed lawn lurking on my sewing table refusing to return to the stash, I was on the hunt for a pattern for a blouse. After much pleasant perusal of my sewing magazine collection,  I settled on Ottobre 05-2013-03, a peasant style blouse with set in sleeves calling for 1.2 m of fabric in my size. Everyone knows that fabric requirements are over generous (that was tongue in cheek), and I am shorter than the Ottobre block.

Ottobre 05-3013-05

However, no matter how I ignored seam allowances, there was no way I could fit that pattern on my 1.1 m of lawn and still have sleeves past my elbows. This was rather annoying after tracing it out!
Back to the pattern search, I was quite taken with the Burdastyle blouses made this Summer  by Sue and Paola. I liked the covered shoulders and the interesting transition of the collar stand into front pleats.

Technical drawing from http://www.burdafashion.com/fr

This called for 1.1 metres of fabric also, but when cutting out this new pattern, there was plenty of fabric, in fact, it occurred to me that I would have a sizeable scrap left over, so I lengthened the blouse, despite reviews of this pattern commenting on excessive length of the garment. I am anti-scrap at the moment.

Its not quite long enough for a dress, but its not too bad as a tunic with a shirttail hem.
I don't usually wear this silhouette, and really wanted a garment with sleeves, but when considering my wardrobe balance it I felt that I would be more inclined to wear a second garment made from the same fabric if the garment in question was more suited to different time of the year than the first one. I thought I would wear my sleeveless lawn dress made from this fabric in high Summer ,and that a lawn tunic, even a sleeveless one, could be worn over trousers or tucked into a skirt, in Spring and Autumn.

You can see that I added a casing with elastic to the back (more casual than darts) for some shaping, and you can't see at all that I added bust darts via a cut and slide method in order to make a FBA.

I also used a more stiff cotton for the facing, and for interfacing in the collar stand and front bands. (Thank you to the Spoolette who donated this fabric at last year's high tea, its the perfect weight and co-ordinates nicely )

This was an enjoyable garment to make, and I am interested to see how it works as a transseasonal garment.  It felt quite an appropriate outfit to wear today to the Sunday markets.
(I bought lots of plants - its been raining.....)