A Seamstress Cat: Cowgirl Maternity Blouse

My newest maternity creation, a cowgirl blouse! This was made by modifying Simplicity 4499, a now out of print pattern.

Several months ago I came across an online set of classes called "Make Maternity Clothes," one of the classes being "Converting Store bought patterns into Maternity Patterns." It is amazing! You can literally turn any pattern you own into a maternity pattern! And it's not just one cut and dry method, there are 5 or 6 different variations you can use for blouses. Plus directions for pants, skirts, dresses, and even formals. I would highly recommend this class to any expectant mother. Because the information in the class is copyrighted, I'm not going to go into detail on the changes I made to the pattern.

What project can get properly started without the help of a cat?

I first bought this pattern about 6 or 7 years ago for 4-H sewing. Back then, I was a size 8, now my pre-pregnancy size is a 10. Thankfully I had made the short sleeve view, so the yolk pieces had not been cut out. That made it really easy to layer them on top of the blouse pieces then estimate how much to add everywhere else.

The pattern called for piping around the yolk, but unfortunately, I only had some in a real pale pink color. And there was no way that was going to work. So I thought, Wal-Mart ought to have some piping... :-( Nope. (Our Wal-Mart has recently majorly downsized their fabric department) They didn't even have that much of a selection of biased tape. I knew I had to put something on the yolk, else it wouldn't be visible in the print, so I bought the only blue colored biased tape they had.

I suppose I can blame pregnancy hormones on this next part, but I really didn't feel like going the extra mile to make the tape look like piping, so I just edged the yolk with it instead.

But even then I wasn't altogether happy with it. It just looked too much like it was home made! So I finally decided to try using one of my machine's fancy stitches to dress it up a bit. My husband really liked the results! It took a while, but they finally grew on me too.

I didn't notice until I was ready to start on the collar that I had accidentally cut out the size 8. After making an extensive search to find the size 10, I realized why I hadn't noticed. It wasn't there! For whatever very strange reason, I had thrown away all the other collar sizes except the size 6. Explain that one to me?

The only way I could think of to fix this problem was to put the size 6 on top of the size 8 and measure the difference, then add that difference in the selvages,

It actually worked! The collar fit perfectly into the blouse!!! I can't tell you how relieved I was.

Here's my sewing companion trying to help me sew on the buttons. How helpful she is. ;-)