1930s blouse with Minerva crafts

Recently, I joined Minerva Crafts blogger network. This allows me to get some free fabric (Yay!) in exchange for blog posts. Well, I can always find a way to use fabric! For my very first fabric, I chose this lovely yellow Ballerina chiffon to make a 1930s blouse. This was a calculated risk since I am not a very experienced user of chiffon, however, I thought I’d be up for the challenge. This blog post is a short summary of the project and you can read the whole Minerva Crafts blog article I wrote here.

For the pattern, I chose the 1930s blouse pattern from the book The Great British Sewing Bee: Sew Your Own Wardrobe by Tessa Evelegh. It is a pattern from the 1930s featuring a Peter Pan collar, shirring, puffed short sleeves, a placket side closure and a peplum.

Sewing this chiffon fabric wasn’t as difficult as I had feared. I sprayed the fabric with spray starch and then ironed it to reduce the shiftiness and it worked nicely. I even managed to make the tiny little curved hems at the sleeves:

The fabric is also opaque enough so that the colour pops up nicely. Here is how the 1930s blouse looks from the side back.

I think that the most challenging thing to sew was the shirring and only because it had to have just the right width to gather the neckline to the right size. I had to rip out the first attempt that left the neckline too big. Finally, I managed to avoid the neckline gap that got judges tut-tutting at the second season of the Great British Sewing Bee.

This was an interesting sewing experiment and it took away my fears of sewing with chiffon. Thank you Minerva Crafts for inviting me to the blogger network and thank you for reading! Happy sewing!

Katja