Around the block

 I have worked on the fit of my two Connie Crawford bodice slopers, and made up a basic shirt from each, but now it's time to try to replicate a slightly different design using my basic block. I like to give myself every chance to succeed, so I picked something I thought would be an easy make -- and also something I wanted to wear.

Like a lot of folks, I get catalogs from lots of retailers. One of the ones I get is from a clothing company called Poetry. Have never shopped from the catalog, and I expect I'm not their targeted demographic. While not high fashion, their clothing has simple, clean lines which appeals to me. As a side note, they also seem to offer more natural fiber items than a lot of others in their price range. One of their shirts from the Fall catalog caught my eye, and I decided I'd like to do an interpretation of that. Here's a pic from the catalog page in case the link disappears:

As you can see, it's a fairly simple shirt - loose fitting, with gathers in the back and a deep yoke, uneven hemlines, 3/4 length sleeves. It is listed as collarless, but it appears to have a shallow collar band.

The block I used had a darted front, one piece back with shoulder darts, and short sleeves. So, the changes I needed to make were: divide the back for a yoke and add width to the back 'skirt' to allow for gathered fullness. Add length to both front and back pattern pieces and add extra to the back for an uneven hemline. Add length to the sleeves to make them full length rather than the 3/4 length of the inspiration garment. I used the collar stand from Butterick 5678 to make the band collar.

The back yoke appears deeper than a standard shirt yoke. I went with a finished depth of 7.5" (19 cm). The one measurement of the original garment I had was a finished length of 29.5" (75 cm) so it was easy to lengthen the back skirt to reflect that, and then 6" (15 cm) was added for additional width.  The front was lengthened to finish at 2.5" (6 cm) shorter than the back.  I went with 3" (7.5 cm) for the hem turn up on fronts, back and sleeves.  All depth measurements (other than finished back length)  -- yoke, difference between front & back, hem turn ups -- were guesses. Hopefully educated guesses, but if I do something like this again I will probably go full on math and measure proportions from the photo.

And here's what I ended up with:

The fabric is a brushed cotton flannel from fabric.com (Kaufman Shetland Flannel Net Pepper) and the buttons were rushed to me (seriously, I got them the day after ordering without any additional payment!) from Wawak -- Mussel Shell Buttons, Dark Smoke color.

So, I am happy with the finished product. I learned a few things, and definitely could have done some things better, but I feel it's a pretty good first effort. I'll definitely be trying this again, and hopefully will have the confidence to up the difficulty level.