Weekend sewing

I’m a little behind in posting this, but I took all the photos for it last weekend, so it’s better late than never! I told Shawn that I wanted to spend all of last weekend sewing. I often think this, but then things come up and I get a minimal amount of actual sewing done. But last weekend, I stuck to it and actually got some projects done. Or got a solid start, at least. A few weeks ago I got a good deal on shirting from fabric.com, so it was time to make some shirts for work.

I scoured my pattern collection and came up with one pattern that I thought would work. (Unfortunately, I realized that my pattern collection is starting to look a little dated.) It’s New Look 6407 and I did a mix of views D and E:

It’s hard to tell, but it’s white with a light blue stripe woven into the fabric. And, yes, it still needs buttons.

So since my pattern collection offered nothing else suitable, I had to look elsewhere. I started online at Burda’s website. I’ve browsed there before, so I knew they had some good looking patterns. And a lot of them are free. But I was curious about this whole print a pattern at home thing. I decided to give it a try with their JJ blouse pattern. In order to print at home, you need a lot of paper (this one was 27 pages) and it’s meant to print on A4 paper, so you either need that, or legal size that you can then cut down to the correct size. I went with the latter option and then there was about an hour of trimming and gluing, until I got to this:

Look! A pattern! I didn’t bother to print out the instructions. A blouse is a blouse, right? And I can look them up online any time if I do need them. So I went ahead and put together a blue shirt in this pattern. The original called for a total of 6 ruffles, which I felt was a little excessive and might end up looking like a 1970′s prom tux shirt, so I just stuck with two.

So I didn’t get quite as far on this one. The good news is that this picture was taken Sunday evening, and I can report that the shirt now has sleeves and the ruffles are a little less out of control thanks to some hidden tacking stitches. Still no buttons, though.

And finally, I apparently decided I needed a real challenge. So I pulled out my Burda magazines from Ukraine to see what blouse patterns I could find. I found a cute one in the June 2007 issue and got to work. My Russian skills are a little rusty, so it took some translation assistance from Shawn. Here’s what I started with:

You can’t tell, but this sheet of paper is the size of my dining room table. And those are all the pattern pieces for something like 8 different patterns. There’s a complex system for figuring out which pieces go with which pattern. Well, probably not so complex if you’re doing this in your native language, but I did not have that luxury. Anyway, I finally figured it out, then realized that my instructions also told me to cut out 5 rectangular pieces in 3 different sizes. I almost had to call for translation reinforcement, but my sewing brain figured out that those must be the pieces for the sleeve bands, facing for the slit in the sleeves, and the ruffle around the collar. So after all this brainwork, this is as far as I got on this one:

Oh well, that will give me something to do next weekend.