I started this shirt on a whim. I had a metre of Liberty wilmslow silk that I’d bought in the post-Christmas sale a few years before I realised that you really needed 1.5 metres to do anything with buttons.
This fabric had been sitting in my stash for so long that the visceral memory of the amount it cost had faded. Vogue 8772 had similarly been sitting in my stash, but unlike the fabric, it was steadfastly reproaching me.
’How,’ it seemed to say, ‘can you count yourself as a sewist if you can’t face sewing a shirt with a collar stand?’
And so eventually I had enough and decided I was going to make the thing. But I wasn’t just going to make it in a nice cotton lawn. Oh no, that would be far too simple.
(The visceral memory of how much the longer lengths of cotton lawn in my stash had cost was rather fresher)
I just managed to eke the body, collar and shortened sleeves out of the metre of silk (as you can see, I decided against the sleeves in the end). Due to a too slim margin of error on the pattern jigsaw needed to get this to happen, I did not manage to get the collar stand. This may have been a blessing in disguise as I had a length of cherry sandwashed silk in my stash (also of longstanding) which gives a lovely pop of colour at the neckline. I also used this to make bias binding to face the armholes.
Despite the tricky material, the blouse itself has turned out pretty well. Vogue 8772 is a nice pattern, well drafted and fairly flattering. Something to bear in mind for next time is that I personally would have preferred the finished blouse to be about 3/4 inch longer at the hip. However, as I will probably wear this tucked into suit trousers when office life resumes I think I can live with it.
I made my usual adjustments to the pattern by reference to the finished garment measurements. I cut a 14 at the shoulders, grading to a 16 at the bust and hip. This is less ease than the pattern calls for but it fits me very nicely so I think it is a personal judgment call. I have found most Big 4 patterns tend to gape at the shoulders in the larger (I.e. above 12) sizes and grading in the armholes is a reasonably quick fix in most cases.