A Comfy, Flowy, Need-To-Use-This-Pattern-Again, Summer Shirt

The past 48 hours have really, really sucked, thanks to some goat stuff. I'm incredibly sad, heartbroken, and just trying to mentally process things. In the next week or so that processing will probably result in a blog post about it, featuring lots of pictures of happier times, but right now,  I just need a distraction. So, while looking through my pictures today I was reminded of a couple projects I completed, photographed, and never got blogged. (Sewing time lately has taken priority over blogging about sewing.) So, here we go, finished several weeks ago, a comfy, flowy, shirt for my mom.

Back in February, when my mom, brother, and I went to Indianapolis, my mom and I hit a couple fabric stores. My home town has a very, very, limited supply of fabric stores, so when ever I travel to another city, I have to see what sorts of fabric stores that city has to offer. One little fabric store we went to in Indianapolis had amazing, too-expensive-for-me-to-afford, fabrics. Wools, silks, laces, cottons, and blends of all of the above. It was great! I love admiring fancy fabrics and touching them, just to see how the texture and hand differs from what I'm used to working with. Now, in addition to all the amazing fabrics, this store also had a great selection of indie patterns and a bin of clearanced McCalls, Butterick, and Vogue patterns. My mom and I may have come home with a few new patterns. (how could we not?)

One of the patterns my mom picked out was this one. Butterick 6215

She thought it would make the perfect summer shirt, so I promised to put it to good use as soon as we found some suitable fabric. Shortly after that I found a soft, flowy, poly-crepe at Walmart. I picked up a couple yards and got to work.

The shirt itself went together easy enough, but then I got to the neckline. A simple V-neck with a facing. No problem, right? Wrong. I made a couple mistakes. First I really should have stay-stitched the neckline before trying to apply the facing. That little step would have saved me some trouble. My biggest mistake though was what I cut the facing out of, the same fabric as the shirt. I really, really should have used a more stable fabric, or at least some interfacing, but I failed to do so and just could not get the neckline to lay right! Finally I shirred the neckline with a couple rows of elastic thread, then cut a slit down the center front a couple inches and narrowly hemmed it. That worked! Nothing at all like how it was supposed to look, but now the neckline lays well, and that's the main thing. (plus I learned a thing of two about how not to face a neckline.)

Now the biggest question, how does my mom like the shirt? Well, as she wears it at least once a week and has requested another shirt of two from this pattern, I'd say she likes it!