Finally Finished....

I finally finished the Liberty shirt, made from the fabric that I was scared to death to cut into.  I finally sucked it up and cut it, and then of course let it sit for a while before I sewed it, still afraid to mess it up.

Here is the final product:

The greatest challenge with this was matching the pattern, since there is a clear horizontal motif.  I'm pretty happy with the way it turned out on the front, I agonized over how to place the front placket on the fabric so that the "right" part of the pattern would be showing:

The matching between the front and back was not great though.  I haven't done pattern matching in such a long time, I totally did not take into account the horizontal bust dart.  With the dart, it means that the front pattern PIECE is going to be longer than the back pattern piece...so the hem will fall in a different place on the fabric/print.  Had I been thinking, I would have lined up the hems of the pattern pieces and matched the pattern there.  But, I wasn't and matched the underarm instead.  So, my front and back patterns match PERFECTLY for all of three inches.  Then the bust dart throws it all off.  You can see that the hem in back is in the middle of a different motif than the front:

But, I really don't think anyone will notice.  I did get the sleeves matched and set properly so they are mirror images of one another.

While I was in the middle of delaying working on this shirt, I got a "wild hair," as my grandmother would say and decided that I wanted to create a set of interchangeable shirt pattern pieces that I could put together in different ways to make whatever I wanted to.  Different collars, different sleeves, yoke, no yoke, loose fit, tailored fit, but all pieces that could be used with one another.

Because I had that really well-fitting shirt pattern from Burda, I decided to use that as a base.  That shirt, if you recall, was a classic button down, with a fairly close fit, which used vertical darts for shaping.  I had already made pieces for it that would allow it to be converted to a western shirt, but I also wanted a more feminine version with gathers and a yoke, also a yoked shirt with a back pleat for a dress shirt....different sleeves, regular cuffs, french cuffs, you get the idea....so I could just pick pieces of the pattern and have whatever I wanted and to be able to know that it would fit together.

Since I already had the Burda shirt traced and kew it would fit, I used it as a base.  Using some other shirts as an example, I started by drawing a yoke for it.  Then I slit the vertical darts and closed them, creating a wider pattern at the top where it could be gathered into the yoke.  That didn't give quite enough room for gathers, so I put another slit in the pattern and added tissue there, too:

I then used this to trace off my final pattern.  I used a tie collar from another pattern, increased the height of the sleeves so I could gather that as well, and this is what I got:

And from the back:

I used a drapey poly georgette that had been in my stash ever since I bought waaaaay to much of it on clearance at Fabric.com.  It was cheap enough that it would have been perfectly reasonable to just use it for muslins, but I think the print goes well with this pattern.

Now, I need to figure out how I'm going to do the rest of this interchangeable nonsense....princess seams, long sleeve, short sleeve, raglan sleeve, french cuffs.....wish me luck!