Silk Blouse

At our ASG meeting in April, Angie Zimmerman held a workshop for us to discuss the various techniques for working with silk and also gave us the opportunity to get patterns adjusted.

I decided to get Angie to give my Marfy 2254 blouse a fine tune so I could finally use the silk that I purchased in China for this blouse.


Angie made very minor changes to my original toile:

1. Took off the 1.5cm at the centre back neck edge that was added.
2. Reduced the armhole and sleeve additions by 0.5cm (half of what we added).
3. Increased the cuff and sleeve edge width so that the cuff doesn't grab my arm.

Here is what we did to the front pattern and then did the corresponding adjustments to the back and sleeve.



Then it was time to cut out the silk. Oh did it have some movement in it, thankfully with Angie's help I got it cut out. What was really surprising was the sleeve cuff which is cut on the bias. When I took this off to cut the 2nd lot, the way the fabric expanded was rather terrifying. Angie advised me that I need to cut out the cuff interfacing from the pattern and then get the fabric to fit it!!

I did quite a bit of hand basting with this blouse to make sure that it didn't move when I sewed the seams. I used a silk Gutterman thread for the basting as this won't leave press marks in your fabric.

Angie showed us a number of seam finishes and I chose to use a normal seam as the french seam was too thick.

You sew your seam normally and then press to one side and sew a small zigzag (L1, W2) right next to your original stitching and them trim back to the zigzag.



I don't have a button stash, so I called into Spotlight on the way home yesterday and purchased these buttons.



and plan to drop my blouse and buttons at Mick's on the way to work tomorrow for him to do the buttonholes for me.

Here is the blouse completed as far as I am going to work on it.



It will make its debut during Me-Made-June.