Shirtmaking

In an effort to distract myself from the imminent disaster of Brexit, I have returned to shirt making, this time for me. One of the joys of the internet is being able to learn from people that one has never met. After several hours looking at patterns, I decided on The Granville shirt, and having read all of the comments, made the following adjustments:

• shortened the sleeves by 4cm
• Shortened the shoulders by 1cm
• raised the bust dart by 4cm ( wrong decision)
• took a lot of fabric out of the hips, about 20cm all round in the end - this pattern is for very curvy women
• did not add the pockets

I followed many tutorials, and stitched test yokes, collars, many, many collar points, cuffs, sleeve plackets, front plackets,  buttonholes and devoured the content on Off The Cuff, a superb sewing blog.

The results?

Sleeve placket

Back yoke

Inner yoke, and collar stand

Front placket

Finished shirt

The fabric was a beautiful voile from Seasalt. They very generously make many of their fabrics available by the metre, even from current ranges.

I like it, I will wear it, I will make another one - all in all a successful make, even although the pattern matching was rather tricky, and I had to cut three sets of collars before I got the orientation of the colour swatches correct!