Over due post time! And two for the price of one!
Day off today. Headaches and nosebleeds = no desire to be in an overheated office. So I'm having a day of trying to shift headaches and finish some stuff up. I have people coming over next weekend so I need to clear some space.
So, stuff what I've finished of late.
This is the LARP shirt I've been working on for a while (way too long). It's view D of Simplicity 3519, and I would like to say that I am never making this pattern again (unless, possibly, someone pays me).
It's not that it's a bad pattern per se. It's just annoying. It uses a shit load of material, and it gives you the most voluminous shirt ever. Which is great if you want a voluminous shirt of poncing. But I didn't. I wanted a bog standard shirt with a bit of interesting gathering.
That gathering is why it uses so much fabric. The two body pieces are about twice as big as they need to be to accommodate all the gathers. The gathers weren't actually too bad to do. Time consuming since I did them by hand, but bearable.
The sleeves are actually where I had the real issue. They're also about three times larger than they need to be, because the expectation is that (for this view) you add elastic to the cuff so that you end up with a tight cuff and a big poofy sleeve.
This is not something I can deal with. I hate long sleeves for the most part, and tight cuffs are right out. I roll my sleeves up a lot usually, so I ended up taking about half the depth out of the sleeves. This was achieved by putting the shirt on, holding my arm out and shoving a pin where I wanted the cuff to be. I then drew a line from that point to the arm pit, stitched it up and then sewed a normal cuff. It isn't perfect, but it will do.
I'm pretty pleased with the gathers. They do sort of make it poof out a bit too much over my chest, and the fitting at the back is just plain weird, but whatever.
I didn't interface the collar yoke which the pattern called for, mostly because I couldn't be bothered, but also because I wanted it to be really floppy.
Also, I made this as an attempt to empty out a load of bobbins, so there are all sorts of weird thread colours that don't match the fabric. I'm not overly concerned.
As bog standard shirts for LARP go, this probably isn't too bad. It's not entirely what I was looking for, and if I made it again, I'd probably extend the body down a few more inches and use the same sleeve modification, possibly with a button fastening.
I'm not sure if I will make it again. There are a couple of other patterns that have less gathers and more sensible sleeves.
So, yay for actual finished projects.
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