My Jungle January blouse is finished, and I hope to take a photo of it "as worn" if we get a day when it isn't pouring rain. I modified
the Athena Blouse pattern (reshaped collar tips, added peplum, midlength sleeves with cuff bands)
The antler buttons just seemed to fit with the colors of the ponies...
Yes, I know that ponies are not jungle animals, but I asked, and "animal print" was determined to include
all animals... The shawl collar construction worked very well, but I was not entirely happy with the shape of the finished collar (no fault of the pattern); the wide spreading shape doesn't suit my face, and the grain of the collar means that the horses on the collar are once again tilted. I reshaped that part of the collar to a scalloped and curved edge instead. Fortunately I had not yet stitched the collar facing down, so it only needed my making up a template, turning the facing/front inside out, and re-stitching and pressing.
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...and, in the end, it is sort of a wearable muslin, in that (while it is quite wearable and will coordinate well with all my pinafores) some significant modification was needed, and I would probably do a bit more fine tuning before making it up again. First off, I cut the blouse fabric an inch and a half too long, despite shortening the pattern beforehand. I no longer do a turned hem on blouses that will only be worn underneath pinafores, as since the hemline always remains unseen, simply serging the hem edge gives a flatter and faster edge treatment that is just as durable.
Also, the mostly straight up and down bodice ended up needing some additional hip width, and rather than fit in some godets, which would be most annoying to finish the points and edges, I decided to whack out as long a rectangle from the remaining scraps as could be managed, sew repeating darts into the rectangle to curve it, and then cut a centered rectangle on the back of the already stitched blouse and inset the curved rectangle as a flared peplum. Definitely a non-standard alteration, but it echoes the square armscye and looks intentional. In the future I would also want to cut the sleeves at least an inch longer, which would have been possible had I not cut the front and back too long. Overall the pattern now gives me a second (almost) TNT option if a straight grain blouse front is needed, I love the square armsceye, and intend to do some more fine tuning the fit as well as experiment with collar shapes in the future.
I made the blouse entirely from a treasured piece of fabric I had on my resource shelves for a long time, I used some old sheeting as sew in interfacing for the front facing/collar panels, and the pattern itself and the antler buttons have been in my files for years. I feel pretty good about turning all this into a garment I will enjoy wearing, and about working through some of the needed changes in a pattern I've not used in a long time