1950~ blouse with curved yoke and back pleat box


Hello friends,

It has taken me about two months to finish this, however I am overwhelmed with joy that the blouse is finally completed!

The pattern is taken from Applied pattern designing, illustrated, page 71, it was definitely a new project for me as I’ve only ever done a dress, top and simple circle skirt so making the curved yoke and button holes was a very good learning process!
I’ve made a few mistakes along the way but it’s only experience to take to the next project!

I chose a nice little floral cotton fabric.

To start off I cut out all the pattern pieces, which already shows that I made a fun little mistake of cutting out the right side of the front bodice piece twice. And having only the amount of fabric I needed for this blouse I was lucky there was still enough left to cut out the left front bodice piece.

The entire blouse was stitched together by hand with a back-stitch along all the seams, the curved yoke was also attached using this method because I was afraid it would otherwise rip open. After the blouse was stitched together I went ahead and hemmed down all the rough edges, and mistakenly also one of the armholes! Which I put off with undoing until almost the end of the project, because who wants to undo their work?

When that was completed I decided it’s time to attach the interfacing to the blouse, I chose a nice bright red color that would really pop out so one of the colors has a very nice bright red color on it. I did this by simply pinning the interfacing to the right side of the front bodice and stitching it together on the edge facing the center with a hidden running stitch, and on the right side of the bodice I attached it with a very thin hem so it is not visible from the other side (If this will prove rigid enough I’m not sure, but it holds out until now!).

Simply pinned down onto the fabric, although I did make the mistake of not doing it when the bottom side was properly ironed so I have some weird stretching going on.
Hidden running stitch (at least how I call it) that only takes the upper layer of the hemmed down edge so it is not visible from the front side of the garment.

Once completed I tried to get the back pleat box to work without attaching it to the garment, but I had to stitch the pleated box with a very long running stitch to the backside of the garment, otherwise I had no idea how to not make it invert on me when I put on the garment.

The sleeves also come from Applied pattern designing, illustrated but from page 147 instead.

To finish it off I made the button holes and attached the button on the right side, which I learned from watching Bernadette’s video on YouTube. She explained wonderfully how to make button holes!

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