Mint green Diana blouse by In House patterns

My old Diana blouse was made a few years and hundreds of cookies ago, so it is no wonder that it doesn’t fit me anymore. I still have the pdf pattern by In House patterns so I decided to make a bigger one out of this lovely mint green viscose. This time I went for the size 6.

The Diana blouse pattern is quite wide at the shoulders so I narrowed the shoulders down to size 0. This is very easy to do without touching the armholes by making a vertical cut at the middle of the shoulder and shifting the sides of the pattern so that the width is correct. Below you can see my adjustment. If you look at the size markings at the shoulder level you’ll notice that the size 6 is about 1 cm wider than the size 0. So, this is the amount that I removed from my pattern.

I have grown fond of French seams, since it means that I don’t have to use my serger. I also wanted to make the front placket look nice from the inside, too. Instead of serging the vertical seams I sewed only the outer placket pieces onto the blouse front. I ironed the seam allowances towards the placket and folded the seam allowance of the inner placket piece to cover the seam. I didn’t know how to sew the inner placket on neatly with my machine (the fabric is shifty) so I hand stitched it on. This is the end result from the inside of the blouse:

If you have a good reference for how to make this neatly using a sewing machine, please drop a comment! I am planning to make this blouse out of silk and I would like to learn a better method! This is how the finished placket ended up looking. I added a small gold button to decorate it:

I warn that the sleeves are very fitted. Even after I went from the size 0 to size 6 there isn’t any extra width which is clear in the picture below. I think my arms are quite average so it might be wise to make sleeves one size bigger if you don’t have very slender arms.

This is how the Diana blouse looks from the back:

I like how this blouse hangs on me and it has just the perfect length. I can wear it over my trousers or tuck it in, as I wish. The only thing I might still adjust are the gathers at the shoulders. I think it would look better if I moved most of the gathers closer to the collar.

Anyway, this blouse was more of a toile, since I have some gorgeous silks that I want to use to make a blouse. Now that I have a pattern that fits I can finally make something out of them.

Thank you for visiting my blog and welcome back soon. Feel free to share this posts with your sewing friends! Happy sewing!

Katja