Have you seen the Stockholm blouse from atelier scammit? No? Well I hadn’t either until my lovely friend, Hélène, drew my attention to it because it has bell shaped cuffs, and I declared a love for bell shaped cuffs when I made my Itch to Stitch Sirena dress.

I got myself into a bit of a state with the tracing off of this pattern as I couldn’t decide on the size. In the end I erred on the side of caution and went bigger, and dropped the bust darts and, of course, it’s a bit big and the darts are a tad low! No real biggie as I used black viscose leftover from a shirt I made for Archie and nothing shows up too badly. This fabric is gorgeous and I wish I had more.

This pattern is really easy to make, which is lucky as the instructions are in the form of a video – all in French! It has raglan sleeves and tucks along the sleeve “bells”. I suspect that the sleeves are supposed to be 3/4 length (looking at photographs of other makes), but I think that mine are longer because I went up a couple of sizes. This pleases me as I really like the cuffs at the wrist.

I enjoyed wearing the blouse loose over Style Arc Elle trousers (made yonks ago, and modified to have a back yoke), but decided that I would make some white ones for spring to go with the blouse.

I also wore it with this new skirt, tucked in at the front and hanging loose at the back.

back view

The skirt was made from a piece of very stretchy, strange black denim-like fabric that I bought in an op shop. I thought I’d use one of my self drafted skirt patterns, but the fabric  was a slightly odd shape so I had to put a faux felled seam down the back and one side had a bit of a curve. I traced part of the Named Inari dress bottom to get that curved side seam shape, and then failed to get any photos of my fabulous seam.

I put small, jeans style pockets at the front (traced from my A-line skirt block) and a pocket at the back, and then thought about distressing the black to emulate jeans. I used light sandpaper and then heavier sandpaper and made a lovely hole – luckily in a scrap. Then I thought about bleach. I wised up and practiced on a discarded pair of Archie’s jeans until I thought I had the ratio of water to bleach right and learned that bleach takes a little while to do its thing! Having done all this, Archie then asked me to repair these jeans so he could wear them on a camping trip to the outback. I did and hoped he wouldn’t notice the little light patches everywhere.

Anyway, having got my bleach/water mixture right, I set about painting my skirt with a paintbrush. I put extra bleach on the edges with a toothbrush and worked really hard on getting the skirt body even.

The elastic waist was a pain to get even, so I decided not to bother on the grounds that it would never show, and then, of course, it did show, but I decided that I didn’t mind it too much.

I did quite a poor job on the back but didn’t notice until it was too late and I didn’t want to go back and reapply the bleach as I had thrown out the mixture and didn’t know if I could replicate the ratios – poor science here! You can see the extra attention that I gave to the pocket edges. I am going to try this with my denim jeans in future.

In spite of a few errors,  I really like my bleached skirt. It is super comfortable and it goes brilliantly  with my new Stockholm blouse and made-by-me tights.