Since I have already given you sneak preview of my latest project in my last post, I might as well tell the full story!
After my successful wearable muslin of Made by Rae's Josephine blouse, I quickly cut out and sewed up another one, switching out the sleeves for a slightly less poofy look.
I used some cool Japanese fabric I bought in Bangkok's Chinatown (that's a mouthful of international-ness, eh?). The selvage is labeled "kimono chintz poplin. made in Japan" and it's deep red with a really light grey... the design is stylized mountains (or maybe clouds), but occasionally when I look at it too hard, I see a certain part of the male anatomy. This is particularly funny because when I Googled "kimono chintz poplin" to see if I could find the name of the company that manufactured the fabric, the first hit was another sewist bemoaning the fact that she saw "hot steaming piles of crap" in her kimono chintz poplin and that she couldn't unsee them. Ha! I am trying my hardest not to see the man parts in my fabric because I love the shirt.
I switched out the sleeves that came with the pattern in favor of the narrower 3/4ths sleeves from the Painted Portrait pattern. I think they work ok... still a good deal of poof at the shoulders, but less fabric around the lower part of the arms. A better style for me as well as a fabric saver, so win-win. I probably could have just shortened and narrowed the Josephine sleeves, but laziness set in.
I made the same construction changes I made for my first Josephine (besides the sleeves, of course), which is to say not many: skipped elastic and bound the neckline earlier in the process.
Here's me GIFed again, because one can never have enough GIFs of oneself floating around the interwebs:
