Steampunk-Flavored Blouse: Done!

Please don't ask me what was going on with my hair. It looks like my head is on fire, except that the fire is...hair.

I am so in love with chevrons now.

Huzzah for me, for I have finished my first blouse! Complete with a front placket and cuffs and a collar and everything! And you know what? It wasn't nearly as bad as I was afraid it was going to be! And I'm also almost done with my vaguely steampunk Edwardian walking skirt as well! Isn't this amazing? Not a floral-patterned bed sheet dress in sight! Although to be fair, the skirt is made from donated curtains.

I already wrote about the construction of the main part of the blouse, complete with tricky sleeve construction. Finishing the cuffs and collar was fiddly and time-consuming, but not actually that difficult. I think I know, now, why my mom made so many blouses when she was a young seamstress. I'm claiming this blouse as my Sew Weekly inspired-by-a-family photo challenge, even though I don't have a specific photo of my mom in a home-made blouse like this; she has plenty of pictures in blouses she made herself. I will post a full write-up of the construction of those pieces as soon as I can, but in the meantime I'm just so thrilled with how this outfit is coming together.

How perfect is it that a lady at church would be getting rid of old, huge curtains in such a wonderfully steampunk color palette, and they weren't even polyester monstrosities to boot! They're actually 70/30 viscose-poly, and they say in huge letters to DRY CLEAN ONLY; I ignored this directive, of course (I'm not going to pay good money to dry clean free curtains), and washed them in my bathtub in cold water and mild detergent (to be perfectly forthcoming, Method hand soap, in pink grapefruit, in case that matters) and hung them up to dry. Walnut was concerned to see these giant dripping things in his bathtub, but he got over it. Which is good, because let me tell you, these curtains badly needed washing -- not because they were dirty, but because they smelled like a candle store had wandered into them, gotten tangled up, and then died inside. Seriously, when I opened up the bag I felt like I was being physically assaulted by potpourri. Anyway, now my skirt is pleasantly, faintly sweet-smelling.

You can see here the weird shape of the waistband.

The skirt is a simple four-gored skirt, originally based on the OOP Simplicity 8375. I made up a size 10, my usual for Simplicity patterns, only to find the waist grossly oversized. Rather than take in all the seams, I settled for pleating the back to make a vague bustle-ish thing, which looks quite nice with all the stripes, in my opinion. The pattern calls for a simple long rectangle for the waistband, but between the shortness of the blouse back and the weight of the bustle/train, I knew I needed to have a waistband that would be much higher in the back. I ended up drafting this chevron thing, which looks nice in the front but needs some help in the back. I still need to figure out how to fix the closure so that it looks better, but at least it's high enough to cover the bottom of the blouse. I am also still waiting for my American Duchess Astorias to come in so that I know where to hem the skirt; it just hits the ground in front right now when I tippy-toe. I'm considering adding horsehair braid to help the hem stand out, but I'm not sure how that would work in the back with the dragging train.

I still want to make a shoulder-strappy-holster-vest-type-thing to round out this outfit, and then once I throw on all my various dangly things I'll be well on my way to a full-on steampunk detective outfit! The only reason why I chose detective, by the way, is because of my birthday magnifying glass from Anthropologie.

I'm technically not finished with the skirt, so I won't write up a summary just yet, and I'll put the summary for the blouse in the construction post. You're welcome, Shayna.

The awesome thing about the weird sleeve construction is what a wide range of motion I have, all without ever having to set in sleeves or make gussets! I seriously want to put this sleeve construction into everything now. And again, please ignore my hair.