Blouses again

I don't think a year goes by when I don't attempt a blouse of some kind, sometimes several. And each time I think that this time, yes, this time, I will make the blouse that will work. It will fit. It will be warm enough. It will not come untucked/will lie nicely untucked.won't hang down below my jacket. This blouse will work with a jacket or sweater and this time, I will wear the blouse and enjoy doing so. This time the blouse will make it out of the wardrobe rather than sitting on the rail, begging to be picked, quietly hopeful, like the plain girl at the side of the gym at the school dance.

And I suddenly realised the other day, that if I could only get a blouse pattern to fit me, I could stop all this blouse making malarkey because what has me motivated to continue this mainly quite senseless pursuit is the belief that I SHOULD have a good blouse pattern which fits me. And I don't have one. And until I have resolved the fitting issues and feel I've licked the problem, I won't settle.

And the striped blouse didn't lick the problem. Mainly because I thought I'd be a clever wotsit and not have a back seam. Which meant I couldn't do one of my normal back alterations. Also, I forgot to alter the front pieces. It was a complete dogs breakfast.

But, I learned something interesting from it.

Both shirts and jackets bind very badly on my biceps when I move my arms forward. I get horizontal wrinkles all down the upper arm, to the point where I have permanent marks on my favourite jacket from reaching forward to type. I had always assumed this resulted from my wide upper back and have done all sorts of alterations to fix that. However, whilst fitting the striped shirt I was waving my arms about in an increasingly annoyed "look at me, I'm in a strait jacket, what a bummer" kind of a way whilst trying to see my own back to work out where on the back seam or armhole I needed to release extra width, when it dawned on me that maybe my arms needed more room to move forward in the sleeve.

So I tried the large bicep alteration from Fit for Real People, which entails cutting and spreading the sleeve pattern to open up the centre section. I spread mine three quarters of an inch as a starting point. Then I made the worlds' ugliest muslin. And whilst it didn't seem quite perfect, it seemed closer than the striped one. So I went ahead and altered both of my Marfy blouse patterns, though I only did the bicep alteration on one of the sleeve patterns. I will use the same altered sleeve for both shirts.

I cut one of the shirts out last night and will hopefully get the other cut out in the next day or two and then get the construction under way this weekend.