Burda Style 10-2010-119 blouse again, the clinical wardrobe

I finished making an 11 piece, 2 capsule wardrobe for the SWAP (sewing with a plan) challenge at Stitchers Guild a few weeks ago. Fortunately for my distance sewing, there was an extended deadline for the phototaking. My daughter is home this weekend and has spent most of her time in front of the camera. I hope this is offset by the pleasantness of sleeping in her own bed and eating home cooked food ;)



 Here is the last SWAP piece, a blouse for my daughter to wear to work or clinical sessions at University. I have used Burda Style 10-2010-119 for a second time in the SWAP - this is the fourth version between 2 daughters. It is an excellent  blouse, being very quick to sew, but crisp and professional in appearance.



As I did last time, I have finished the front opening with a placket, instead of a flippy facing, and extended the neck line bias binding to make a button loop. The bias scarf collar is hand hemmed (train trip entertainment,1 hour and 45 minutes of hand hemming) and hand sewn to the back neckline, which are the only lengthy procedures in the blouse construction. Burda has a raw edged scarf collar in their boucle top version, but I prefer this clean finish.



I have made a square shoulder adjustment, but in this version of the blouse, the sleeve head looks a smidgeon high. I am blaming this on the crispness of the shirting cotton, as in the softer cotton version, cut out with exactly the same adjusted pattern, the sleeve head looks spot on.



I am looking forward to seeing all the SWAP wardrobes. 

Stashbusting  1.5m of shirting cotton, 2011 Michaels Fabrics

Burda Style 10-2010-118 top and some knitting

Thank you for the kind comments regarding man trousers. I deeply appreciated the affirmation, as I was suffering from sewing exhaustion.
What a relief to get back to something simple, and with flowers!

My daughter came to visit on the weekend, which was very pleasant, and I made her a little top.



This is Burda Style 10-2010-118 without any neck bow. The only adjustments for daughter the first are a slight squaring of the shoulders and a little off the side seams at the waist, which makes it a very quick project.

 

I finished the neck slash with a folded placket, rather than a facing, and bound the neck with a self fabric bias  strip that I extended to make a button loop. This is deliberately set so that the placket is a little open, like a v neck, as it looked too prim and proper fastened with no skin showing below the jewel neckline.

I like it with jeans,  but I think it will also work, tucked in, as a work top. The fabric is a metre of cotton print that I bought in 1998  to make her a little Australiana blouse (those are flannel flowers in the print and the fabric is exactly the colour of flannel flower leaves).

 I have some very long range sewing intentions, but it is lucky I can still get a blouse for her from a metre of fabric!



I have nothing more to say about this workhorse pattern, so I shall slip in a knitting digression.



This perfect layering piece cardigan is a free pattern by Linda Wiggins,available on Ravelry, Peggy Sue, and took only 5 x 50g balls of 8ply bamboo/wool yarn. I am very pleased with it. It is my first attempt at knitting a top-down cardigan.



I modified the pattern by adding short row shaping for a higher back neck, and added a little width to the centre back when it seemed a bit tight at this point. I also inadvertently added considerable length to the stocking stitch section when I misread the directions and knitted this for 8 and a bit inches instead of 9cm, but I think it still looks fine.

It took a month, which is pretty good for my knitting speed/time allocation.

Stashbusting statistics, 1 metre of fabric, some of my oldest stash cira 1998, but I am quite pleased that this fabric was made into a reasonable approximation of the garment for which it was originally intended ;).

BurdaStyle 10-2010-147 boy's shirt

There are a lot of people who regularly sew for their sons. I am not one of them, being easily distracted by more-appealing-to-me feminine clothing. However, I often intend to sew for my son, sewing for someone being an expression of true love IMO, and when he goes fabric shopping with me (a thankfully rare occurrence, due to a fabric appreciation duration of approximately 5 minutes) he likes to pick out fabric for himself. He has a good eye for colour and loves a loud shirt print, which are quite fun to sew, really, once I get started. This fabric is a souvenir from New Zealand (January 2012 fantastic family holiday), being pure Kiwiana quilting cotton with a print of the endemic toi-toi.

  

Getting started on this fabric was quite tricky, because he has outgrown the largest size, + 2 uptracings of the shirt pattern I use for him. I got rather distracted whilst pursuing my Burdas for a boy's shirt, but after only half a dozen projects or so, came across this pattern in the October 2010 Burda. 

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

  

This is not a boy's shirt pattern, but a shirt dress/tunic, but as it is just an elongated shirt, and thinking that 10 year old boys and girls do not differ greatly, I went ahead with it anyway, in size 140cm, this being correct in height and only a few cm too big in girth for my son - in the boy's sizes in Burda. I shortened the tunic by 10cm, according to the finished length desired, but made no other sizing changes.

  

 The shirt does fit, but rather too perfectly for a new item for growing child, which is entirely my fault. Apparently 140cm boys are about 4cm thicker in girth than size 140cm girls, according to Burda, and I should have made him the next size up in the girls' size. Fortunately he is slim for his height, in an entirely masculine way of course ;).

  

 You can see that I have made a few adaptations to the pattern.

  

 I shortened the sleeves, for more use in a subtropical climate (also arms grow very quickly out of long sleeves with cuffs), and used contrast fabric for the inner collar stand, inner yoke, and added to the top of the pocket. I constructed the lined yoke by machine using this method. For the front placket, I used a 3 layer cut on folding technique as described in David Page Coffin's book Shirtmaking. I did not try to match any of the pattern, other than cutting with nap, and cutting the fronts so that the pattern lined up horizontally. I also used a fancy topstitching pattern of 3 stitches alternating with a single stitch, as I did not want the topstitching to be lost in the loud print. 

 

 I like the contrast details, and although he looks rather grim in the photographs, I believe this has mild garment approval from the recipient.
 This is another item for the February Stashbusting Challenge, using 1.2m of stash. Unfortunately there are some rather large scraps which I am putting straight into a bag for my quilting mother. There, gone!

Burda Stye 10-10-118 again, office junior work mini wardrobe

I have a maternal halo this week. Here is blouse #3 for my daughter's mini work wardrobe.

Burda World of Fashion 10-10-118

This blouse is a second version of the Burda blouse I made her for day 1, much quicker as all the fitting adjustments had been completed already. This time I have actually used the neck detail as set out by Burda, and it is worth the fabric hogging, in my opinion. The neck is bound with a bias strip, fastened with a small button and loop, and a bias cut scarf is then attached to the neckline. In Burda, this blouse is made from a wool tweed, and the bias scarf is fringed at the ends and the long sides are unfinished. As my daughter's blouse is made from cotton shirting (woven plaid in black,grey and white, so both sides look good) from Michael's Fabrics, I have finished the edges of the scarf with a rolled hem. The scarf is a single layer, and drapes beautifully.
 
Photographs are again taken during the lunch break, and the cotton is standing up pretty well to a half day at work.
 
Today, she wore the blouse again ( I think it is her favourite), but untucked, over her black RTW (Christmas present from Nanna) skirt.
These are after work photos, with the shoes off and hair out, but I think you can see the idea of the second outfit from this blouse with a different look.

Burda 10-10-118 Work Blouse

My younger daughter is having a week of work experience at a law firm. Naturally this raised visions of a completely new wardrobe, as mostly she wears her school uniform, or the ubiquitous jeans and t shirt. Note I am not saying whether these visions belonged to me or my daughter ;)

 Despite some joint Burda perusal, which was rather fun and gave us thoughts of fancy shirts with collar stands and funky details, and some serious mutual pattern tracing and cutting out, this blouse was the only thing I finished before she started work this morning. This may have something to do with hosting a 10 year old birthday party this past weekend and not considering that this might cut into my sewing time slightly. 10 year olds are a lot of fun but slightly exhausting en mass.
 Could anything be more simple? Unfortunately it was not as simple as it looks. There is a FBA, square shoulder adjustment,waist shaping and severe fabric pinching in this little top. I added a side dart for the FBA instead of adding it to the gathers at the neck where the rest of the bust shaping lives.

Burda World of Fashion 10-10-118

 You can see from the line drawing that there is supposed to be an attached scarf (on the bias) and much longer sleeves with a cuff. That is why Burda expected me to have over 2 metres of fabric. I squeezed the top from a cotton shirting remnant of about 60 cm and scraps. Scaling down to a size 34 probably helped with this, but the main thing that reduced the fabric consumption was making the bias binding for the neck finishing extra long and turning it into the neck fastening bow instead of the fabric hogging bias scarf (which I rather fancy).

 When the top was finished, I thought it looked pretty dull on the hanger, but on the recipient, I think it is quite cute for an office junior.

  

It was nicely quick to sew once the fitting and fabric squeezing was over, and she might even get another one before she runs out of clean shirts.......