Sewing Burda for Others: ooh er scary! 10/2008 #113

Thanks for all your lovely comments on the pink dress - I haven't put it away in the wardrobe yet, instead leaving it to hang on my bedroom door so I can admire it's colourfulness!  Gail, you're right that it's not nursing friendly, and nor do I really have any occasion to wear it at the moment since I'm not back at work until next March so it's really an aspirational dress rather than one I can wear right now.  Nothing wrong with sewing a pretty dress for no real reason is there? And MareeAllison, you crack me up liking the muslin best - you don't happen to want the rest of that fabric do you?

So has everyone realised that Christmas is just around the corner? I haven't even started Christmas shopping and I'm already feeling shopping fatigued - there are just so many birthdays in my circle of family and friends in October, November and December that it's challenging enough to get through them all before starting again on Christmas presents.

For my mum's birthday a few weeks ago I bought her a vibrant blue linen blazer and matching necklace  from Sussan's to brighten up her wardrobe since I'm on a colour crusade for myself and am dragging everyone else along too. I didn't want the blazer to be an orphan in her wardrobe though, so I decided to make her a shirt to go with it too.

Now sewing Burda for yourself can be difficult enough since you need exact measurements and to really work on fitting the garment to get the best look, but when you're doing this as a surprise and only getting an idea for size by peeking at the labels of clothes on the clothesline it's even more difficult! So I decided to pick a fairly simple style that didn't require a close fitting and could be easily altered if needed.  Digging deep in to my magazine archives, I found this raglan sleeved blouse #113B from the 10/2008 issue:

Instead of the glamorous sating pictured in the magazine, I chose a thin cotton that is more appropriate for our summer weather which has been a long standing resident from the stash, which has a woven stripe through it as well as a floral print.  I think this fabric is lovely, I don't know I haven't used this fabric before, but I think it is perfect to go with the jacket:

Annoyingly I didn't pay enough attention when cutting this out to avoid the dreaded 'bullseye' effect of the flowers on the front, but I'm hoping that those flowers on the centre front at bust level are off centre enough and clustered enough not to cause it.

I'm telling you, the most time consuming part of sewing something after cutting out must be the fitting because I managed to sew this up in about 2 hours.  And thankfully it fit pretty well, all it needed was to let the darts out a little.  The funny thing is that the jacket didn't fit though - luckily that can be easily returned and I didn't spend hours sewing it!   And here's my mum, grimacing through her pose (first time appearance on this blog I think?):
 

Don't worry I trimmed that wayward thread on the hem after taking this photo!

And with the leftover fabric I made myself one of those nifty infinity scarves, so none of this fabric made it back into the stash or scraps pile.  Bonus!

I'm not going to bore you with a tutorial for the infinity scarf - there are already billions of them out there and it's just a strip of fabric sewn into a tube.  In fact it's one of my pet hates arising from all the crafty blogs I read - people who do a detailed tutorial for every thing they make, whether it's super simple and not necessary (ooh face washers made from a towel: cut towel into squares), or they've been sewing for about 3 milliseconds and what they made might be exciting to them but is really ordinary/borderline crap, or if there are already millions  of tutorials for that out there already.

Ooh sorry for veering off into crankyville there, Toby is cutting some teeth and I'm a little sleep deprived these days!