Saturday, January 8, 2011

Pendrell Blouse - Fabric

Yesterday afternoon I went on a field trip to choose some fabric for my Pendrell Blouse as the sew-along starts next week. After ducking into Textile Traders and coming out empty handed, we carried on down the road to Spotlight.

Tasia suggests "slippery, shifty fabrics like silk or polyester charmeuse, chiffon, rayon challis, crepe de chine" for the blouse. I ended up (due to my mum's bad influence) getting two fabrics - the first one below is some kind of chiffon I think and the second is a lightweight silky satin (both mostly polyester I think).

Pendrell Blouse Fabric

This one will need to be worn with a cami underneath, you can see how see through it is in the above photo - you can see the white selvedge. This fabric was on Sale - $3 a metre and as it's a wide one I only needed 1.8 metres, topped off with a 10% birthday discount - so the total fabric cost was $4.86 + $2.41 for thread.

Pendrell Blouse Fabric

.Here is the second fabric:

Pendrell Blouse Fabric

This one had $13 a metre on the ticket, and as it wasn't as wide, I need 2.5m for the fabric, making it a relatively expensive blouse... but on my mums urging I decided to go for it as it's got such a nice hand and is so incredibly soft. When she put it through at the till it came up at 70c a metre!!! (but really 63c a metre because of my birthday discount) So this one cost $1.58 for fabric! Bargain.

Pendrell Blouse Fabric

All in all, a very successful sewing trip! I can't wait for the sew-along to start.

However, first I have an important decision to make - I'm not sure which views I'm going to make out of the fabric. I definitely want to make Vew A, but I'm not sure about which fabric. I'm also not sure about the ruffled version... when I had ruffles on my JJ I removed them because they didn't come out well after washing, I'm worried the same will happen again with this. So - opinions please?

3 comments:

  1. Very pretty fabrics and at excellent prices, too!

    Thought I'd jump in here and let you know the ruffles will hold up well after washing. They're cut on the fold, so you don't have to hem them, and therefore there are no fiddly edges to unravel in the wash. I toss my rose-print polyester version in the washer every time I wear it (about four or five times now) and it's totally fine. Hope that helps give you confidence on its wash-ability!

    ReplyDelete
  2. Hey Rachel, Tasia is right (of course) the ruffles are fantastic because the edge is folded so they are doubly strong. I made view A in a cotton and the sleeves are a little "stand uppy", I would suggest making View A in the softer fabric, and View B in the stiffer of the two.

    Love love love your fabric choice! I can never find good fabrics at my Spotlight - so impressed with the ones you found! Can't wait to see the blouses made, Sam xox

    ReplyDelete
  3. Oops...having read this I realised I used feet (not yards) when I did my conversion to metres and bought my fabric. I'll be taking another trip to the fabric store!

    Thanks for the heads up.

    ReplyDelete

Comments make me smile :)

Related Posts Plugin for WordPress, Blogger...