Okay, so here I chronicle my attempt to make a sari and blouse from 1 – 3 a.m., during ChiCon. Um. It didn’t go exactly as planned.
Step 1 — making the blouse. I had previously bought and downloaded a sari blouse pattern, and immediately realized that making a proper sari blouse (which is very closely fitted and has lots of different pieces to seam together carefully) was probably going to take a solid 8 hours the first time around.
Which I definitely didn’t have time to do, especially since I’d previously given up on getting this outfit done before ChiCon, and the only reason I was even attempting it now was because I hadn’t been able to sleep, and after a few hours of trying and failing, I thought, fine, I’ll get up and sew.
But what I *could* do is take my Ashton top pattern (from Helen’s Closet), that I’d sewn one top from before, and try using my brocade sari blouse fabric with it. And that went just fine, whipped it out in maybe 30 minutes.
It needed a little more bling, and I’d picked up some border trim for this project previously, so I tried just sewing that on. It didn’t work exactly as planned — I was envisioning something that would lay flat, and instead, since I was folding it in half for the neck and armholes, it ended up standing up a bit around the neck. But y’know, that was fine — it was kind of a nice effect.
So then I had a top, not nearly as tightly fitted as a sari blouse is traditionally supposed to be. But I figured I could safety pin it in a little tighter on the day of, and maybe eventually take it in to fit very closely. Good enough for jazz, or rather, good enough for a ChiCon outfit that wasn’t going to undergo close scrutiny.
I admit, if my mother or any of my aunties had been attending, I’m not sure I would have dared to wear this and call it a sari blouse! 
But they weren’t there, were they? No, they were not!
And even though I did have a few South Asian friends attending who I knew would know better (hi, Roshani and Divya!), I also knew they would be forgiving…
Onwards to the actual sari. This is where it gets REALLY dicey.
Ashton top pattern here: https://helensclosetpatterns.com/…/ashton-top-pdf-pattern/