Simplicity 2307

This is Simplicity 2307, a brand new Project Runway pattern.
The fabric is a cute little goldfish print by Heather Ross, that I bought from Cia’s Palette a couple of years ago. It was a skirt, for a while.

I have to confess that I don’t always like Project Runway patterns. They tend to offer lots of variations, which I do like, but they seem to make things unnecessarily complicated, which I don’t.

Having said that, there are only two things that I struggled with a little bit on this one. The first was the pleats at the top of the sleeves. You have to make two little pleats and then overlap them at the top. This looks beautiful when you’ve done it, but the instructions on exactly what you needed to fold to where to make this happen didn’t seem very clear. The second was that by the time I’d interfaced both the collar and the facing there were six layers around the neck, which makes it a bit stiff. Next time I probably won’t stiffen the facing, and I’ll trim the seam allowances of the collar a bit more closely.

Despite the fiddly aspects of the pintucks and the pleats and the collar and the little tie belt at the back, this was actually a fairly straightforward pattern to put together though. You do have to be super accurate in your cutting and sewing though. Otherwise you’ll find little frustrations, such as the sleeve bands being a couple of millimetres too short, or the sleeve heads not fitting in quite right. This is definitely a precision piece.

The pattern doesn’t give a blouse length, but I was restricted by having such a small amount of cloth to play with. I ended up using every last inch of my fishy fabric – you have to promise not to notice that the fish are in fact swimming sideways around the sleeve bands!