Tuesday, May 21, 2013

Paisley Darling!

You may remember the sneak peek of this shirt from last week.  So here's the scoop:

Horrid MySpace quality photo
I bought this sheet at Goodwill with the express purpose of injecting some 60's paisley shirt love into my wardrobe.  I found a Threads button up shirt pattern on clearance at the local fabric store and figured for $2 it'd be worth a shot.  Sadly the result was lackluster.  You saw it briefly (and blurrily) at the end of Me Made May Week 2 and once I get the sleeves fixed you'll see it some more.  After spending sooo much time (collar stands are hard, yo) on something so lackluster I wanted some instant gratification so I returned to an old favorite.

Can you feel the happy?  Not really, but it's there.
As you can probably guess from the title I used the Darling Ranges dress-turned-shirt pattern with the collar piece from some random dress pattern I haven't even tried out yet.  The collar is a bit, erm, large... but I've decided I like it.  It's retro, if you will.  And you will here, because this is my blog which means I make the rules here.

Oooh... So pointy
Besides, all the better for collar popping amiright?

Totally epic collar pop
Since I've made this pattern in it's various forms about a bajillion times there's not a whole lot left to say about construction I guess. 

Weirdly awkward photo, but aren't the rhodies pretty?\
Except that I raised the neckline about an inch and a half.  This feels a lot more work appropriate to me.  Unfortunately I think that this modification has somehow introduced an excess of fabric just below the shoulder and above the boobage creating a liiitle bit of fabric pooling.  
Are you staring at my boob pooling?  Gah! Don't look!  Just kidding; go ahead
I have a hunch that if I take out a smidge from the front shoulder and maybe level out the slant a bit (square shoulders + slanted pattern pieces = no bueno) it should fix the problem.  How long has it been since this pattern at all resembled the Darling Ranges dress?  And how weird is it that I never actually made up the pattern as written with the dirndl skirt and side pockets and everything yet I've made so many modified versions?

One thing I haven't done but need to: SWAYBACK ADJUSTMENT!!!!!
  Since spring has been doing it's violent meandering thing lately (meaning that it was 80 degrees two days last week, raining balls and cold today, and a little bit of everything between has happened between the two including crazy gale force winds that take down trees!) I realized I have a serious dearth of summer tops in my meager wardrobe.  Is that the longest most pointless sentence you've ever read?  I'll bet it is.  This pattern is great sleeveless.  It's got just the right amount of coverage and binding the armholes with bias tape instead of the pure evil that are facings is genius.  Easy peasy =


You can sort of see the totally randumb green thread I used for everything: topstitching, sewing on white buttons, etc.  I had this thread leftover from... something.  I couldn't find any white thread and I wanted to sew noooow.  So I grabbed this not-really-matchy avacado green thread and I thought it would stand out.  It turns out nothing stands out agains this crazy paisley haha!  This picture totally fails to show you two important features of this top.  First, I used all different buttons.  They're all white, they all have two holes, and they're generally the same size, but they're all slightly different.  This was (believe it or not) intentional.  I've seen some reeally bold mismatched buttons here and there lately and it's a look I can get into, especially seeing as how I bought a huge bag of assorted buttons from Goodwill awhile ago and am slowly realizing how few matching sets there are :P

This photo has nothing to do with what you are about to read but it;s wonderfully awkward non?
The second thing this picture fails to really show is the total lack of matching up of those under bust seams is happening here.  See my fingers?  That's where the seams are.  Yeah, I know.  WTF?  Where was I looking when that happened cuz usually I'm all over that one thing.  If nothing else I at least try to match up those big seams.  By the way, the photo above has nothing to do with this paragraph, I'm just trying to stick to the format: paragraph --> picture ---> paragraph---->  etc, etc....


Time to Make: 4ish hours over two days

Cost: Basically free, fabric, buttons, interfacing, pattern, and even weird green thread all from stash

Verdict:  Isn't it obvious?  I love it

Make it again?  Again and again and again





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