Costume Store - Victorian Blouse

This week is the second week we've had to work on the blouse (2 weeks until hand-in). I thought I'd had everything under control with the construction of the blouse so far, and decided to work on it up until a point I'd need to consult our tutor, Dexter, with the next construction stages. However, at the beginning of the week he had an unfortunate accident and was signed off due to an injure. I was really worry about the way in which the project would now develop without assigned teaching support. Instead of panic I decided to seek help from other tutors on our course to begin the next stages of assembling the blouse.

The next stage in constructing the blouse was the pleated front bib/yoke. At first glance it seemed simple enough, a piece of pleated silk organza cut in the appropriate shape and attach to the front pieces of the blouse.  Despite the appearance of its simplicity this wasn't the case. Dexter had left us with instructions of how the pleats were to be formed in order to form crisp, neat pleats, important due to it being the focal point of the blouse. The instructions left me pretty confused. After trying out a combination of folding and pinning solutions I accepted defeat and sought the help of another tutor. Together we managed to work out the pleats fold combination. 

After working out the fold combination I tacked down the main line I needed to follow when machine sewing the folds. Despite being aware of what I was doing I still found it pretty difficult to work with the silk organza. Before even beginning working with it I'd starched it 4 times to stiffen it and give it more control. Although this did help the organza proved very difficult to work when sewing on the machine and I didn't manage to get all the pleats perfectly even. Undoing the stitching for something like this isn't really possible to do without damaging the organza, and because we'd ran out of money for the costume project I excepted the outcome and will take this experience into consideration when it comes to working with fabric like this again.

After pleating the organza the next task was cutting out the bib/ yoke detail piece for the front of the blouse. I laid the patten on top of the organza and to my horror found that I didn't actually have enough fabric to cut the whole pattern out. Instead of panicking I took a moment to consider the situation and how to approach it next. Placing the pattern piece as tightly backed at I could, I drew around them to see how much wastage was left. Luckily there was just enough waste pleated organza to perfectly attach to the section of the bib/ yoke missing. Once happy I then cut out the bib/ yoke and joined on the separate piece of pleating to it. You could never tell that this was the case as it produced a smooth finish. This is the result...