Zero Waste Puff sleeve top

This is something I made at the start of May, but then got swept away by Me Made May and wearing my old clothes and never wore it.

It's a self drafted blouse based on the DIY Daisy Maya dress. Making that unlocked zero waste patterns in my brain, and I started messing around with it.

Changes I made:

• I lengthened the top by 15cms

• I lengthened the sleeves by 15cms, then gathered them at the wrist as well, making a puff sleeve. 

• I added darts. This wasn't massively successful, they are both too short and too high to really do anything. I'm not sure if I should try place them correctly if I made another one, or just leave them altogether. Adding them makes the whole thing not zero waste as well, although only slightly!

The fabric is some lovely liberty lawn I bought in a destash ages ago. you need 1.35 metres for this and I think I had 1.5, so I ended up with a bit left over so I'm hoping to make that into bias binding.

Here's a diagram of all the measurements I used for this project in case it is helpful. The main measurements are based on the instructions from the Maya top, I just adjusted as above. It’s quite funny that there’s a piece I labelled waste, in a zero waste top. But it’s tiny and it’s only there because of the darts. If you didn’t have these you could just have the front and back as identical rectangles.

One thing I didn’t note down was how long I made the sleeve hem bands. I kind of just messed around pulling the gathering tighter until I had the opening the right size, and then cut the sleeve bands down to size. Sorry I didn’t take a note of how long they ended up being, but it was substantially less than the full length of the strip.