“MeMadeMay (2020) day 6. Rifle Paper Co. blouse number 2: the one I made incorrectly and therefore never quite fit. Well, the good news is that it fits as well as it ever has, so here we are. Also featuring my favorite Voodoo Vixen trousers. Today’s laundry day, so I’m enjoying the briefest respite from my tiny apartment and getting some dance rehearsal time. It feels so nice to have space to move!”

Ahh, those halcyon days at the beginning (relatively speaking) of the pandemic. When we thought that everything would be back to normal any day now. When Vaudezilla was still around, and they still had their studio space on Irving Park, I would go there to do laundry because my building charges $2 to wash and $2 to dry, and our dryers at the time… basically didn’t work. The V! studio was originally built out to be a live/work space, and had in-unit laundry (read: FREE) in the basement. Kenneth and I would pick up coffee from Beans and Bagels, schlep our clothes and my costumes (and frequently my camera and tripod) to the studio so I could rehearse and record video for the Zoom shows we were all still trying to do. And it was nice because Kenneth had finally moved in with me full-time in March, and we wouldn’t actually be any further than 10 feet apart for the next… almost three years.

That blouse is Simplicity 4238, from 1953. Mistakes were made (which I’m sure I detailed the last time I posted it), but the one thing I remember that I don’t think I’ve said before is that one of the things I had to do to compensate for it’s unfortunate size issues was work the buttonholes as close to the center front edge as possible. They were really kind of harrowing. This might have been the last time I wore it, actually.

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“MeMadeMay (2019) day 13. I’ve stuck through almost 2 weeks, y’all. This is the *other* blouse I made from Rifle Paper Co. fabric from Harts Fabric and… it’s a mess. The pattern was from 1953 and substantially less clear on instructions, with respect to the other blouse I made from this fabric. Whatever. It’s wearable.”

This was Simplicity 4238, as mentioned from 1953. And it was, indeed, a mess. The instructions didn’t really make it clear, on first blush, that the facing and the button band were all sort of one thing, and I didn’t have a whole lot of fabric to speak of after I made the first blouse anyway, and (because I wasn’t as picky about only buying patterns within a specific size range at the beginning) I had to do slightly more resizing than I would have liked. …Which then went completely out the window, because of the aforementioned issue with the facing and button band being a singular thing. …Basically I added an inch to the front which subsequently got entirely consumed by the facing/button band situation, so it ended up being hilariously tight.

I did end up culling this piece from my wardrobe, but I can’t even actually tell you what happened to it. It either went to the Village Discount outlet in one of the NINE GARBAGE BAGS of clothes that I got rid of during the pandemic, or it ended up in an Ampersand sale.

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