I was pretty smitten when I first caught sight of the Sew Over It Anderson blouse... so classy, so drapey, so effortlessly elegant. The source of inspiration for the blouse pattern was apparently Gillian Anderson, who rocks a silky wrap blouse like nobody's business:
Maybe it's my fabric choice (black and white checked/gingham rayon challis) or maybe it's that the pattern is not right for me (or both?), but I feel like my blouse is less classy Gillian Anderson and more like an ill-fitting '80s Working Girl monstrosity... sigh. Tragic, this make.
This blouse is just not working for me. Too much fabric, too much blousing, too much fiddling with it to get it to hang right. I know sometimes I complain about not liking things I've made on the blog and then eventually I come to like them, but I fear this one is irredeemable. This is just wildly unflattering on me...
The front of the blouse is loosely draped, with basically only the overlap at the hem holding it together. I put a few hand stitches at the bust to keep it from totally gaping/showing my entire front, navel to nose, but I'll say: it makes me very nervous that all that stands between me and full frontal exposure is a couple of my shoddy hand stitches.
Although the blouse has that lovely gathering at the inner shoulders towards my neck, the fabric wants to be hanging more towards my armpits, so it's always making its way outwards and I have to keep pulling it back towards center. Not ideal.
Also: is there a lot of fabric here or what? I feel like I have totally lost my waist. The blouse is gathered by a drawstring in the hem. On the Sew Over It Anderson page, Lisa models it tucked into pants and/or a skirt, but I struggled to tuck it in because of all the excess fabric... too bulky.
The sleeves are a little bit long on me, but that's the least of my worries with this one. I used some cute mother of pearl buttons on the cuffs:
I'm kinda sad about this one. I just can't make it work for me. As Tim said when taking the photos, "You're not going to like these..." Arg! I had high hopes. Luckily there is enough fabric in this blouse that I should have enough wiggle room to recut it into something else.
