I’m sure if you’ve been following my sewing for any length of time you’ll know that I’m an enormous fan of the brand I Am Patterns. They recently launched their ‘I Am Divine’ collection and as soon as I saw the new designs I immediately added two of them to my ‘to sew’ list!
The I Am Hesat Blouse shot straight to the top of my sewing queue because I already had the perfect fabric in my stash – 1.5m of absolutely stunning Cloud 9 rayon from Cloth Kits in Chichester. I purchased this back in the summer when we went away for our wedding anniversary – it’s such amazing quality it almost feels like a cotton lawn and the colours are deliciously saturated. I wanted to wear the finished blouse to The Fold Line team Christmas gathering , so I printed the pattern and got cracking.
I opted for my usual size 38 in the pattern, which I find is always a nice fit on me. Cutting everything out was easy peasy as there are just 3 pattern pieces for the blouse – a front bodice, a back bodice and a sleeve. I was a bit tight for time during the week when I made my blouse, but I needn’t have worried because it is a RIDICULOUSLY quick sew! I stitched the raglan sleeves to the bodice pieces, sewed the under-arm/bodice seams and hemmed the top in just a couple of hours one evening.
The next evening I tackled the rolled hem finish on the neckline and cuffs. I’ve only done this once before, incidentally on another I Am Patterns project – my Perle Dress. If you have an overlocker this is dead easy and once the machine is prepped it takes a matter of minutes to do the actual stitching. Your overlocker manual will tell you everything you need to know, but this is the set-up for a rolled hem finish on my Brother 3034D:
– Remove the left needle and thread the machine for a three thread overlock using the right needle
– Remove the stitch finger
– Adjust both the stitch width and the stitch length to ‘R’
– Set the upper looper tension to 5, the lower looper tension to 7 and the needle thread tension to 4 (I used the settings for fine fabrics as I was sewing with rayon)
And that’s it!
Now the time came to pop my shirring cherry! I haven’t purposefully avoided the technique – I just haven’t particularly wanted to make any patterns that required it, but Hesat changed that. I did a lot of research online and found a particularly helpful tutorial by none other than Florence Knapp AKA Flossie Teacakes. Following her tips gave me great results, particularly using the walking foot on my machine. I found the trickiest bit was getting the shirring elastic through the bobbin tension disc, but once I managed this it was smooth sailing all the way!
The neckline was a bit too wide once I finished shirring, even though a really steamy hover with the iron retracted the folds beautifully, so I followed the tips in the Hesat instructions to tighten the gathers further. You do this by gently pulling on the thread tails of the elastic (much like when gathering fabric normally) which was super easy to do and once I was happy with the fit I tied-off the threads as normal. Voila!
My blouse was finished in just a few very pleasant evenings of stitching and ready for an outing to London. I got lots of lovely compliments from my Fold Line colleagues and I think I Am Hesat might have been added to a few of their ‘to sew’ lists too!