Progress (very little) Report

I bet you were expecting to see a photo of my finished wearable muslin. Me too. But the Sewing Gods had other plans. Or maybe it was the Flabby Arms Gods (or are they Demons?).

But first, let me back up to go in the order I sewed yesterday ...

The collar is in and bias faced, with NO HELP WHATSOEVER from the Burda instructions, tankyewvellymuch. In fact, I turned to Kwik Sew 2927 after my 7,948th read of the Burda instrux. Really, I'm usually pretty good when it comes to written instructions of any kind. Except those darn WOF instructions. I usually get the general idea and already know a good/better method even when I don't fully get their step-by-steps, but yesterday I just couldn't get past a particular sentence (I'll add it later so you can share in the crosseyed-ness) and there I sat. Stuck. I tried a few ways I thought might work, but I wasn't particularly happy with those attempts. Rip, rip, rip. So I flipped through my personal pattern catalog to see if I had anything even slightly similar. KS 2927 to the rescue and I was back on track.



Until the sleeves. They went in perfectly -- nary a pucker. Which should've been a tip-off right then and there. But since this was a muslin, I already had figured they'd go in perfectly because they don't really count. Thankfully, I did have the foresight to actually try them on my arms before overlocking the seam allowances. And that's when I discovered they were too tight. A look in the mirror also showed the neck and shoulders now bunching up horribly. Arghhh.

Time for a sleeve sacrifice. I took off the blouse and slashed the sleeves from just above the hem area straight up overarm to the shoulder seam. Ahh. Much better, and confirmation that the neck/shoulder bunching was because the too-tight sleeves couldn't get down my arm to where they needed to be.



I'm still deciding whether to re-do the sleeves for this. I have enough fabric, but I'm getting kind of sick of it at this point. I really want to move on to the real version. But, will it be Catch-22 if I don't do another sleeve test?? Of course it will. Except that it would be so much easier at this point to just make this blouse sleeveless and bind the armholes. Oh! Idea! I could do one sleeve, baste it in, and revert to Plan B — Sleeveless Wearable Muslin. Hmmm. Now that has possibilities.

On another front (pun definitely intended), I'm going to be reshaping the empire seam under the bust like in the pic below. If you look closely, you can see the blue marker line I drew on myself while wearing the muslin. That line follows my actual underbust curve. (Thanks for the nudge, Belinda.)



So that's where things are at the moment — close, but no ceeeeegar!