American Red Cross Volunteer Nurse's Aide uniform. It is a mouthful alright...
Anyway, I started out pattern-less. I knew roughly what the garment was supposed to look like from a particular webpage I had been doing some research on, but I didn't have a pattern and I didn't even go digging through our existing patterns to see if I had something "similar" that I could work off of. Nope. Instead, I went to Pinterest and looked at originals and came up with this:
You're right. I drafted it. I took my own measurements one afternoon (yes, yes, I know. It's easier if someone is helping you!) and with those in hand, I sat down and free-hand sketched the pattern shapes over onto a regular 9"x 11" sheet of scrap paper and worked out the proper lengths and angles (roughly). Following that procedure, I transferred those to wrapping paper and made the full-size version.
As it turns out my mock-up (made out an old orange, white, and pink striped sheet!) proved that it was too big...below you can see the "take-up" pin-job.
Speaking of the skirt, I did one single panel rather than three for the skirt, but the look is the same, so I don't think it hurt anything! I did a good deep hem (hand-stitched, blind hemmed) like on the pattern too.
My biggest "problem" right off with the whole look was that I didn't want to fork out roughly $30 for the proper patches--which look like this:
After two different attempts, I got the brilliant idea to use cross-stitch material. From there, things breezed along nicely.