Vintage blouse, sort of, recycled

It's all about the fabric.

The clothes I really, really love and keep wearing always have fabric that I really enjoy. Take this crazy blouse. It's a basic camp shirt and I have been wearing it for at least 22 summers. I should be ashamed to admit that but every year I think I should retire this blouse but since the fabric makes me so happy I don't. It has splashes of colour on it and sayings written of what you need to do when you go on a trip, things like drink wine in France etc. I can't tell you have many times I have had the person in the grocery line up behind me start laughing and say "I am enjoying reading your shirt."

I got the fabric so long ago from the Natural Fiber club which was my first foray into mail order fabric shopping.

Well one of the things I have done this spring was to develop a TNT blouse pattern and experiment with morphing different necklines and details from it. More to come on that as I get my photos collected.

One of my experiments was to cut my old shirt up along the side and sleeve seams and recut it with my new pattern. I have the new sleeve pattern laid on the old sleeve for you just so you can see how much ease we wore in those days. No wonder so many sewers say that they used to be able to sew anything that fits and now they can't anymore. That's because clothes are so much more fitted.

Of course the big old sleeve was much lower in the body so I had to add in some extra fabric from the sleeve off cuts the raise the armholes, but I think it got lost in the print.

And I saved the existing collar, facings, buttons and buttonholes which I enjoyed.

Here are my before and after pictures.

I should be able to get another 20 years out of this at least.

I am so green.