How often do you have a project that goes really REALLY wrong on you?
I needed a blouse. I chose a pattern. I cut a fitting toile. It worked – so I cut a blouse in a pretty silk cotton that was so HORRIBLE to work with my subconscious saved me by accidentally chopping the hem off so short it was about 2 inches above my bellybutton and made it no longer wearable.
(I have no photos of this iteration. That’s deliberate.)
So i cut the blouse again, this time in a liberty cotton lawn from The Fabric Store. And what had worked in a slithery, accommodating fabric didn’t work at all in a crisp lawn. So I dropped the sleeve heads. And I chopped off half the sleeves. Then I sewed up the slit in the open back, and the resulting seam stood out like a dinosaur tail, so I chopped almost 3 inches out of the middle back too.
Then I wore it out for a test run, and found out that the shoulder seam was so deeply sloped that the neck of the blouse stood almost an inch and a half up from my actual shoulder line and slid around backwards, sideways AND forward.
I decided to hell with my pretty French seams and hand-picked neckline. I pinned in a new shoulder-line, pulled out the overlocker and –
Well, I had fallen on a muddy street and busted my wrist, and that was the very first day I was in a wrist splint, you see, and what with the aggravation of trying to sew with one arm locked rigid at the wrist and thumb, I sort of mistook my stitching line for the cutting line and buzzed off a half-inch more fabric than I should have. When I saw what I’d done, I panicked and jerked my stiff wrist backwards and took that overlocker knife on a merry trip right down the back of my new blouse.
After that, I threw it in the “I really REALLY hate you” pile for a while.
It took quite a long time, but eventually I decided that sunk costs be damned, I WAS going to finish the thing.
One of the shoulder seams is now 3mm deep and will last about 2 washes before busting out – at best, the bust darts are somewhere up inside my armpits, there’s a big, ugly pleated tuck in one of the sleeves at the shoulder head –
And all of that I can forgive.
What I can’t forgive, is that NOW, after all that hacking and cutting and frankenstein-ing –
NOW, it looks fabulous.
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