My affection for casual, "peasant"-style clothing is a distant second to my flaming passion for 1940's day dresses, but it's in no danger of dying out.
I ran across the Wiksten Tova pattern a little while ago and developed a week-long micro-obsession that involved a lot of Googling images and emailing Amber Jean back and forth with alteration ideas. It seems to be pretty popular; there are a ton of blog entries, Flickr images, and Pattern Reviews.
Stylistically, I've got no complaints, but I noticed in a lot of the examples that women posted online that, unless the wearer was boyishly slim, there seemed to be a lot of bust-fit issues going on. I don't want to pick on anyone's project in particular, but I saw a lot of strain lines running from points-of-busts to shoulders and side-seams. This brought up a point: I know I'm not alone in being attracted to patterns that promise simple assembly and easy, comfortable, wearing, but at some point, one inevitably sacrifices ease for fit
We went back and forth about this for awhile. I suspect that one could do a full-bust adjustment of sorts by widening the side-front and changing the angle of the upper side (the part on either side of the inset), which would basically be like rotating a shoulder dart into the seam between the body of the front bodice and the front inset. I'm going to cut one from scrap to try this (not-very-well-thought-out diagram on the Flickr set).
I waffled about buying the pattern. I've had terrible luck with downloads in general. Luckily, I went home that night to look for something else and unearthed a bag that had several patterns in it that a coworker got from somewhere and had passed along to me. I'd totally forgotten about them until I smelled them. Wow. Maybe six months ago they spent a full week in lingerie bags on the clothesline in a desperate attempt on my part to air the cigarette reek out of them.
This was especially disturbing because a bunch of them were maternity patterns.
I Goodwilled the bulk of them, which were horrorshows of Eighties oversized-ness, but I saved a few even though I don't anticipate needing maternity patterns, well . . . ever, at this rate.
Simplicity 7273 (1975) because it has a cute yoke:
Butterick 4329 (1975) because I liked the yoke, the dropped shoulder seam, and the cuffed sleeve.
4329 is remarkably similar to the Tova: It doesn't have the band collar and the front doesn't overlap, but those are both easily changed. I do need to de-maternity-fy it, which I think I can do by reducing the sweep and probably taking up the center front some:
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