Little love heart blouse

 This blouse should have been finished weeks ago, but I got angry at it when I was so close to finishing and ended up abandoning it and losing my sewing mojo. Today I finally picked it up again and sorted out the 'issues' and got it finished!

Simplicity 1779

Why did I choose this pattern?
I have a lovely purple blouse from Tesco of all places which is a very similar style to that shown in this pattern. It's a sheer fabric with a tie that ties into a bow and little floaty sleeves and I love it, but it's falling apart. So when I saw this pattern and some lovely heart print georgette at Fabric Land, I thought I could recreate my favourite blouse. I was slightly put off when I googled the pattern number and saw that most of the people that had already made this blouse didn't like what they'd ended up with, and I thought a lot of the blouses looked a bit 'mumsy' so I was worried that I too would end up with a mumsy blouse!

What fabric did I use?
I used a dark navy/black georgette fabric with little pink and red hearts all over it. It's a see-through fabric so I'll need to wear a vest under it but I prefer the look of see-through blouses so that was always my intention.

Was it easy to make?
Reasonably, though I seemed to make a few errors along the way and things didn't always line up the way I expected despite using the pattern markings. I'm sure that I just did something silly! The placket, tie and collar are a little bit fiddly but it still went together easily. I used my overlocker for the seams which means no fraying, hooray!

Any difficulties?
When I put the front tie on it didn't line up properly above the front placket and on one side there was a big gap between the placket and where the tie was attached to the blouse. When I tied the tie you could still see the big gap, so I had to do some inventive sewing to get it to line up properly. I'm not sure what happened as I followed the pattern markings but I managed to sort it in the end!

I also originally put the short floaty sleeves on the match the blouse I already had but for some reason I felt that the blouse looked too old ladyish with the sleeves on, maybe the print and the sleeves combined had that effect? Anyway I ended up removing them and am happier with the way it looks in it's sleeveless style.

Am I happy with the finished result?
Reasonably. I'm not entirely happy with the way it fits, it's quite big around the bust and quite low around the neck which meant I didn't even need to bother using buttons and buttonholes because I can get the blouse on and off without undoing it, so I just sewed the front placket together. Let's face it, if the choice was buttoning and unbuttoning or just pulling it on, I would have gone for pulling it on anyway (clearly I'm lazy) so I didn't see the point in adding buttons I'd never use. I think I'd prefer it if it tied higher around the neck so you can't see the vest underneath but as I want to wear it casually being able to see the vest underneath sort of works!

However, despite all that, I'm wearing it at the moment and I think it looks quite cute so I can definitely see me wearing it, and it's not going to be relegated to the back of the wardrobe like I thought it would be when I'd abandoned it!

Pictures