Let's fly away Mimi Blouse

Little preamble: 
Me: Shall we go for a walk? We still haven't explored the surrounding area.
He: Yes sure. I will take my camera in case we see some birds, deer...
Out and about.
Me: Can you take a picture of me?
He: Yes sure.
Me: Wait. I have to take off my coat.
He: What??? I can't belive it. Are you taking every opportunity to get photographs for your blog?
Me (broadly smiling): YES!
Does this sound familiar to you?

 

It looks like I'm working my way through Tilly's sewing patterns. Because next on is the Mimi Blouse from Tilly's book "Love at first stitch". But what can I say, I just love Tilly's style (just to warn you, I'm also having the Francoise pattern in my stash and I'm eyeballing the Arielle skirt).

I started to fit the Mimi Blouse last year, but couldn't get the fit on my shoulders right. You can see a photo of the muslin on Claires Blog where I wrote a guest post about Muslins. (It's the "fitting a blouse" photograph near to the end of the post.) I gave up on fitting the blouse. But the thought that I gave up (and got defeated by a piece of clothing) kept nagging on me. Thus I started anew and succeeded :)

Alterations: The biggest change I made was to add 1 1/4" to the yoke at the shoulder to adjust for my square shoulders. Before, the neckline didn't lie flat, but now it is! Adding so much fabric to the shoulders meant that my neckline changed a lot and thus I had to draft a new collar and facing. I also did my usual 5/8 forward shoulder adjustment.

I had the feeling that the sleeve hem looked a bit tight on some photos of the Mimi blouse. Thus I added 3/8" to each sleeve hem tapering to nothing towards the armhole. I also raised the sleeve cap by 3/8" and moved the shoulder point forward 5/8". That's it. These are not a lot of changes for me and I managed to sort them all out in one afternoon.  

Construction: I followed Tilly's instruction, which were brilliant as always. Tilly suggests to sew the side seams first and then to attach the collar. I think for my next version I would prefer to set in the collar flat first and then sew the side seams.

Fabric: It is because of this fabric that I decided to revisit Mimi. It is super soft and drapey and I knew immediately that it is perfect for the blouse. I think it is some viscose polyester. I bought it from a market stall in my new home town for £2.99/m. Guess what convinced me to buy it? The birds, haha. It looked awful on the bolt, so many creases. Ironing helped :) However, it was off-grain. A lot as you can see on the photo below. But that didn't stop me to cut the blouse.

Off grain fabric.

Do I like it? I love the blouse, it looks so playful and feels so nice on the skin. I was planning to wear it with my Delphine skirt (version 1 and 2) like Tilly does in her book. But unfortunately due to my sway back, there is a massive fabric balloon on my back. It just doesn't look pretty, sniff. But I had a rummage through my pattern stash and found the Mabel Skirt pattern from Colette patterns. I'm planning for ages to make that skirt. The time has come :) Mabel is a tight fitting jersey skirt and I think will look lovely with Tilly's blouse - if the blouse is not tucked in - that's how I plan to wear it.

The first button is gold-blue because I didn't have enough of the blue ones.

Will I make it again? Ahem, at the time of typing version two is already made up and version three has been cut out. I'm in love :) I hope you are getting not bored, but I try to not show them to you one after the other! Have you ever been so enamored with a pattern that you HAD to make it at least twice - without sewing something else in between???