What the Dormouse Sews: Finished the peplum top

It took me a while, but it's finally finished! BurdaStyle's peplum top 08/2012 113. I knew it was going to be more work when I sewed the muslin and found out it needed quite a lot of adjustments. On top of that I decided to replace the back zipper with side seam buttons. When I threw out some clothes way back, these buttons were saved and they looked a nice match with the fabric. At least colour wise, not style wise, they appear to be 80's. They're transparent pink with pink and black opaque diamonds in them.

funny 80's button

against the light

Of course now I needed to make buttonholes... which my sewing machine doesn't make automatically... But it wasn't that hard. I just tried it out on a fabric scrap first, using the zigzag stitch in different settings, and used the buttonhole foot, that helps with making every buttonhole the same size. Maybe they're not the prettiest buttonholes in the world, but they're not half as bad as I was worried about.

my first buttonholes!

Because I took in the bodice so it would fit better, the sleeves turned out to be too tight. As long as I kept my arms down they were great, in fact they would be perfect for a straight jacket. But I want to be able to move my arms, so there were some fabric scraps added to the sleeve and then the sleeve was basted in the arm scye again. When I was satisfied with how far I could move my arms I cut the sleeve loose and drew a new pattern for it.

adjusting the sleeves for movability

For good measurement, here you can see the original pattern pieces compared to the new one.


the original sleeve on top of the new sleeve

adjusted front bodice on top of the original

adjusted back bodice on top of the original

As you can see, the new bodice pattern pieces are smaller than the original, except for the width of the front bodice piece. The arm scye of the front bodice pattern looks larger, but I added an extra dart coming from the arm scye. Maybe I actually need a smaller size than the size according to my measurements?

front bodice with the arm scye dart pivoted out

Here you can see the arm scye is quite a bit smaller. That's why the original sleeves didn't fit (I think). The top was made with the arm scye darts, since the access fabric was at that spot. When I put on the finished result, I realized the way I positioned the darts are very similar to a princess seam. Also the back bodice pattern has a horizontal dart, that needs pivoting away. I figured I made enough changes already and my mind was buzzing from learning all these new things. The pivoting sounds nice for a future project!