Getting Shirty

Today I've been waiting in for the new washing machine to arrive and taken the opportunity to start work on the first of two blue polycotton shirts. I've been thinking about these shirts since the article on the come-back of the silk shirts in January Vogue.  I started day dreaming in silk, but then acknowledged that the reality of washing, wearing and inevitable staining means that it would spend 98% of its life in the laundry basket waiting to be handwashed. My mum suggested polycotton, leant me her Simplicity - Design a Blouse pattern (9210, now sadly discontinued) and pointed me in the direction of Fabrix in Lancaster.

I wanted to include lace in my design, and ran through a series of options in my sketchbook.  I finally settled on a pale blue lace collar and cuffs overlaid on the dark blue cotton. For the second shirt which is a paler blue I'm also going to overlay a lace back. Amazingly the pattern provides instructions for adding lace overlays to the collar and cuffs, unfortunately its still a sewing pattern and therefore prefers to provide rather vague instructions in two sentences or less. Initially everything went quite well.

Then I spent FOUR HOURS sewing the collar & facing...and now I'm not sure that it looks how I wanted. I have enough materials to undo it all, start again and make a longer collar that goes all the way to the edge of the neckline, and now that I know how it works it shouldn't take four hours to do it again...So I'm having a think about it for a few days. Certainly until I've recovered my patience. In the meantime I'll start on the sleeves, but not today.