By Having completed my walking skirt adaptation, I realised I needed more vintage-styled blouses to pair with it…but not too vintage. After all, I never planned to wear this with a corset, so a traditional pattern wouldn’t work.
I decided to start simply, with an old 1980s blouse that I had in my pattern stash – McCall’s 3473 – a lovely fitted blouse with multiple pleats on the full sleeves. Unfortunately, the size I was back in the 80s is not the size I am now, and some resizing was needed, along with a few changes to make it feel more Victorian and less 80s.
Resizing was remarkably easy – my 1950s era “Successful Dressmaking” book gave some fairly simple guidelines: something along the lines of slash along the red markings (image below) and increase or decrease as needed.
For me, it meant making 3 vertical slashes- from the neckline down, from the shoulder down, and from the armhole down. I repeated this for the back pattern too. Then I had to work out how much to spread. I took my bust measure (108cm) and compared it to the pattern size 14 bust measurement (94cm). 108-94=14 (the difference between the two sizes) so I would have to add 14 cm all round. Dividing the difference by 4 gave me the amount that I would have for each pattern quadrant 14/4=3.5cm, and dividing that again by 3 (the number of slashes on each piece) meant I needed to increase each slash by a little over 1cm.
Believe it or not, that worked. A slight increase in length at the pattern’s normal lengthen/shorten line, and we were good to go.
I didn’t do a lot more to change the pattern – I gave the 3/4 sleeve and elongated cuff for a distinctively vintage look, and appliqued lace to reinforce the vintage impression.
I was pretty happy with how it turned out – check out the video below if you’re interested in learning more.
Yesterday-Today 