I Love Summer.

I especially love summer fruit. So, when I opened the box the Fed Ex guy left on my porch, I was thrilled. It was 20 of the most beautiful peaches I've ever seen. They are perfect. Delicious, juicy, sweet as candy, and very, very fresh. My FIL lives in South Carolina and sent them to me. He's moved up on my favorite person's list. If it wasn't so dawg gone hot, I'd bake me a peach cobbler. I may do it anyway.


After spending the last couple of days altering Simplicity 2896, I finally have the pattern fitting great. Instead of making the jacket, I turned it into a blouse. I loved Debbie Cook's blouse using Simplicity 4122, but I tried the pattern a couple of years ago and it just didn't work for me. When I found this jacket pattern, I saw an opportunity to make the blouse but without the round yoke over the shoulders, which was why the blouse was given me so many problem. Here's the muslin of my pattern after adding length, a FBA, and then removing some of the added length.



The muslin told me that I still needed to narrow the shoulders, widen over the hips, contour the front yoke to remove gaping and move the gathers to cover a wider area in the front and back. But, of course, there has to be some problem. I chose a stashed embroidered cotton shirting except there wasn't enough fabric. This is where I got creative. The puffed sleeve is just an outer shell, there is a smaller fitted sleeve underneath, so I decided that it could be put on the bias since it was too wide to fit any other way. In theory this shouldn't be a problem. We'll see how it works in real life. There wasn't enough fabric for the under sleeve or the facings.


Keeping with my decision to use up my stash, I picked through my quilting cotton collection and found a peachy orange tone-on-tone small print. The front was too orange, but the back side was a good match and with a white interfacing ironed on, the front orange side would be washed out too. Problem solved.


I should have time tomorrow to get the blouse sewn. I'll have to go buy some buttons. I didn't have more than three of anything that would match in my button collection.