Love my new Hoya blouse

I have now made the Hoya Blouse three times. Picture is from my 3rd attempt in a lovely viscose from Lady McElroy.

My first attempt was a size 42, in a polyester crepe de chine, looked very nice but was too tight around the shoulders. Seems to be a common comment about D&D patterns and there’s advice on their blog on how to do wide shoulder adjustments.

My 2nd and 3rd attempts were in viscose. This time I traced size 44, but even then the width at the back was going to be pretty tight so I had to make a wide shoulder adjustment as well as a wide bicep adjustment, adding 3 cms to both the back and the sleeves. For the back, I just added the extra width on the side of the pattern that is cut on the fold. I then created a pleat, about 5cms in length from the centre of the back neckline. Works perfectly well. In a 44, the area around the shoulders at the front was a bit too wide so I had to take that in.

For both version 2 and 3 I decided to lengthen the sleeves to a full length and create an elastic channel around the wrist.

For Version 3, I added 3 cms to the length of the top and created a channel for an elastic instead of using the facing from the pattern. I find this worked really well with the fluid viscose I was using.

Really love the result!

The instructions are clear although I wasn’t quite sure what I was supposed to do with the neck facing. It was quite fiddly and the illustrations in the book are not very clear.

I also adapted the neckline as it was rather low!! The instructions don’t tell you to sew a couple of gather stitches inside the seam allowance for the sleeves, so you can pull the gathers and fit the sleeves into the armholes. So if you’ve never set in a sleeve beware!