Blouse Sloper, Part 1

As Ali mentioned, we took a class together over the long weekend to make a bodice sloper. Rather than learning to draft from scratch, the teacher brought in standardized muslins that she customized to our bodies. We then transferred those alterations back to a flat pattern, and were ready to get started!

So I headed home and pulled out a thrifted mens shirt, a cotton/poly blend in a vibrant blue, and got to work muslining out my new sloper.

Not bad. Not sure what's up with the rippling at the bottom, possibly due to the fact that I was basting this together at 6AM on 3 hours of sleep (another restless, insomniatic night), or perhaps my lack of ironing? It has about 3" of ease at the bust, which I like for a loosely fitted blouse look. I do, however, feel like a bit of a rectangle in this.

(I think I cut this crooked - for once, it's not my slanted posture!)

Oops, missed a button! I decided to keep the buttons in the back for a vintage-esque look. I'll probably swap them out for buttons a different color. I like the fact that I don't have my usual swayback issues. I'm wondering if this is because the sloper is cut such that it does not decrease in at the side seam towards the waist - instead, all the back waist shaping is via darts. I've never seen that done before! However, I have something of a broad back and well-built deltoids, so I'm wondering if I should really be leaving all that waist shaping to darts.

Think I need to scoop out a bit more at the front darts in the blouse bottom? I need to lower the front darts by about 1" as well. And, my nice muscle-y arms are going to require wider sleeves and more of an armscythe scoop-out, as my arm movement is currently rather restricted in this current iteration. In all, not bad. I'll tweak about a bit more and show off the results - soon, I hope, though of late "soon" for me as meant "weeks" and not "days".

Finally, in honor of Me-Made-June (I'm not participating formally, but I'm with you all in spirit!)


Handmade shrug, refashioned dress. Shoes DIY'd ala Mom. When I bought these flats, they were nude -- nude, as in, the exact same shade as my skin. SO not attractive. So she dabbed brown shoe polish on them and now they are 1 shade darker than I am. Much, much better. (If you were curious, we bought them with the intention of darkening them. They looked so ... sickly ... at the store.) That Mom, she is the queen of DIY improvisations, is she not?

It runs in the blood. She may have no desire to sew her own clothes anywhere, but she's still got the spirit.