On the Border

Wow, I was really surprised how many of you had gone through similar job layoffs. Your comments really helped me shake my bad mood.
The holiday guests have gone on to Fla. We live a short distance from I95, the main north/south road on the east coast, a good stopping point between Fla and northern locations. Hubby and oldest son are out shopping for a used car with good gas mileage and storage capacity for a duffel bag full of ice hockey gear and sticks. Yep, they took the bag on the test drives. I pity the poor salesman. The smell of a bag of used (sweaty) hockey pads is indescribable. No amount of soaking the pads in a tub full of bleach solution can erase it. Phew! The reason for the new car is that as of Jan 1, younger son is a legal driver. He will inherit the “loser cruiser” an old, mud colored, no horsepower, mini van. And older brother gets a “new” car in preparation of going off to college in the near future.

As for sewing, I have been working on the final pieces for my 6 PAC wardrobe. The one inspired by my misty morning drive to work.

I order this double georgette silk fabric to make a blouse.

and got this

A border print! Not along one selvage edge, but every 26 " in the print. This is the 2nd time DenverFabrics has surprised me by sending me a border print when I thought I was getting an allover print. There was no mention of this in the product description and the border was not shown in the online picture. This annoyed me greatly because I had ordered a specific quantity assuming an all over pattern. And they always ignore the border placement when they cut the length specified. So each cut end was a different distance from the border. Grr. When life deals you border prints, you’ve got to get creative. I found the Purrfections 1039 modern poet blouse pattern in my collection and thought the border print could be used for the cuffs and cross over band.

Oh and the border was not printed on the cross grain. It was about ½ inch off at one end. Better to have the fabric of an interfaced band cut slightly off grain, than to incorporate the border on the bottom of a garment piece and have to cut the piece out slightly askew for the border to be straight.  After reading the patternreview.com reviews of the Purrfection pattern, I felt it would require too many alterations in the back, sleeve and shoulders for me. Those are my problem areas. I still loved the style though. I looked through old Burda Style magazines for a similar shoulder princess seam blouse pattern that I could modify to look like the Purrfections blouse. I found the perfect one in Jan 2008 blouse 105/106.

I overlaid the Purrfection center front  pattern over the Burda center front pattern and traced the deep V neck line with a 2" overlap at center front.

The  neckline is on the bias. To make sure this edge did not stretch during sewing, I did several things.
1. I used light weight fusible interfacing on the facing.
2. I made sure to cut the interfacing using the pattern piece (accurate) rather than the garment pieces or the pattern piece with the garment fabric still attached (inaccurate) and yes, I am guilty of doing this.
 3. I used fusible straight grain iron-on stabilizing tape on the neck line of the garment front pieces. I pinned the fabric to the pattern, wrong side up, to ensure it was the exact shape of the pattern. Then I applied the fusible tape over the seam line.

Since the neck band I wanted to use was much wider than the one on the pattern, I moved the neck/ band seam outward towards the shoulder seam, otherwise the band would have been covering my ears. I added some thin flexible trim at the band seam to accent the V neck.

I will post pictures of the blouse on me when I finish the new pair of pants I am working on now.

Does my blouse match your kitchen? DH and I remember the color scheme and pattern of the border as being very popular in the tile selection at the Do-It-Yourself stores a couple of years ago.