Girl’s Josephine Blouse and Dress Modified Outfit

We are so pleased to present you our version of the Josephine blouse pattern by Violet Fields Threads.

We started with the Josephine blouse and dress pattern because we were inspired by Frances & Suzanne’s Flip this Pattern contest.  The contestants are sewing some amazing creations, and we wanted to sew along.  The things we love most about this pattern are the pin tucks and the ruffles, and we wanted to accentuate those two things without drowning them out in a printed material.  Now we’ve seen the Josephine blouse and dress pattern made with a print material, and it’s absolutely adorable, but our goal was to emphasize the pin tucks and ruffles.

For the little blouse, we started with some fabric we fell in love with when we saw what Venus over at Suburbia Soup did with this material for her submission to Elegance & Elephants Root Sewing Series –  Sew Your Heritage.  She mentioned that she’d gotten her fabric from JoAnn Fabrics, and you can be sure we hightailed it over there just as fast as we could!  They had some, and we snapped it up!

This fabric fits perfectly with our goal of emphasizing texture in our Josephine ensemble.  We made a few adjustments to the original pattern, but we will go into depth on the design elements in our designer post this week.  For now, we’ll just generalize and say we changed the shape of the collar to a more Peter Pan collar shape, shortened the long sleeves to elbow length, and used our only printed fabric for the V-cuffs.

A little about this printed fabric.  We found this fabric a few years ago, and it was one of those where we didn’t know exactly what we were going to do with it, but we knew it was coming home with us!  It was designed by Luana Rubin for Robert Kaufman with proceeds benefitting breast cancer research.  It was made in at least 6 colors!  In fact, we HAD TO get some of this fabric in both purple/blue and browns.  It is the most amazing fabric…the detail of the roses is so exquisite, and the ombre effect is stunning.  We only used a little of the darkest part of the ombre as that’s what matched our skirt fabric the best.

 The skirt fabric is a sueded blue cotton we picked up at JoAnn Fabrics also.  Again, it matched our goal of emphasizing texture perfectly.  Now since we were so in love with the pin tucks and ruffles, we decided to flip them from horizontal to vertical on the skirt!  We also wanted the ruffle on the bottom of the skirt to have the same tightness of ruffling as the ruffle on the blouse, so after some intense algebra, we figured out how much fabric we needed to gather into a ruffle!  But more about that in our design post, later!  We also added in just a touch of our amazing rose printed fabric to tie the two pieces together.

Just because we are slightly crazy, we’ve entered this little outfit in Project Run & Play’s Season 9 Contestant Search!  How it works it you enter your piece, and the contestant is chosen by vote.  So that means we need your vote! 

Please click through on this link and vote for us!  The voting begins at midnight Wednesday the 19th, so after that time:

Click on This Link (it’ll open a new window) to Vote For Us (we’re #38)

Make it beautiful,

Audrey