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 it out again in a pretty silk cotton that turned out to be so horrible to work with my subconscious saved me and I accidentally chopped off the hem so far above my bellybutton that the blouse was no longer wearable.
(I have no photos of this version of the shirt. That’s deliberate.)
So i cut out the blouse again, this time in a fun liberty cotton lawn from The Fabric Store in Brisbane. And what had worked in a slithery silk cotton 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, forwards AND sideways.
I decided to hell with my pretty French seams and hand-picked neckline. I pinned in a new, flatter shoulder-line, pulled out the overlocker and –
Well, a few days previously 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 sliced off a half-inch more fabric than I should have. And 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 some considerable 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 – at best – before busting out, 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.