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 off the hem so far above my bellybutton that it was no longer wearable.
(I have no photos of this iteration. 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, 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. 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.