So... some fun news: I'm now a Fabric Mart Fabricista! I'll be blogging over on the Fabric Mart blog every few months. Here's my first project!
For my first project with Fabric Mart, I chose this killer Aegean Blue rayon/tencel chambray... it's a lovely color with a cool, slightly nubby texture. The chambray has a great hand: nice and drapey but also perfectly crisp when pressed... ideal for shirtmaking! It also looked fabulous as a jumpsuit, as Tiffany demonstrated recently!
Speaking of shirts, I made the Liesl + Co Recital Shirt, a princess seamed shirt with a pleated, tuxedo-style front. I love the versions of the Liesl + Co Classic shirt I made earlier this year, and Liesl said the Recital Shirt was based on the same block, with many of the same details, so it was a no-brainer to try out this pattern!
Let's be up front about one fact: the pleats on this shirt are not my best work. I don't know what happened, but somewhere along the line, between the pattern tracing (wow, the lines for all those pleats were very close together!), fabric marking and remarking (I used a Clover Chaco Liner, but the chalk lines seemed to disappear before I got to sewing the pleats, so I had to re-do them), and the sewing, things went embarrassingly awry. They are all different sizes and spacing!
But once they were done, I couldn't bear to unpick them. The thread I used so closely matched the fabric that it would have been impossible to remove it! I decided that, although you eagle-eyed sewists can clearly see my mistakes, your average Joe likely won't notice it. I never claimed to be a perfectionist. (BTW, have you listened to the Love to Sew Podcast on perfectionism? Worth a listen!). I moved on and finished the rest of the shirt.
So, back to the rest of the shirt: I feel like I made up for my mistakes with the pleats with the rest of the details: my collar is crisp, my tower plackets nicely topstitched, cuffs cleanly sewn, and buttonholes blameless. Everything went swimmingly after the pleat disaster! The only fit changes I made were to do a full bicep adjustment of 1", which I also did for my Classic Shirts.
I love some of the details; the little pointy, fold-over collar, in particular. I had perfectly matching buttons in my stash, which was fortuitous!
I like, but don't love the final shirt. I adore the fabric, but the shirt feels a bit oversized. When I wear it untucked it looks a bit sloppy. It's nice tucked in, although I need to find the right pants to wear with it. Here I've paired it with my True Bias Lander pants, but maybe I need to wear slimmer trousers to counteract the slightly oversized shirt?
I'm looking forward to making this shirt again and perfecting both the fit and those pleats!
