Tuesday, April 13, 2010

Pintucked Cotton Shirt

I love love LOVE this shirt! It was made out of remnants of a shirt my grandpa had made for him (I never found the actual shirt though...weird). Luckily, my grandma always buys way more fabric than needed, so lots of remnants!

The fabric is absolutely beautiful - you might not be able to tell in the pictures, but the flowers are all rimmed with gold. I knew I had to make something that I would wear a lot with it, because the fabric is just too pretty to waste!



I started out just cutting two squares out with the selvage edge (yay no hemming) at the bottom. I sewed them together making a tube big enough to fit around my hips with some room to spare. Then, I made a little yoke - that was the tough part, since I didn't really use a pattern and just made it up. I used some plain black fabric for the 'strap' part in front, and made the 'straps' in the back out of of the same fabric. Quite frankly, I did this because I was running out of material!

Then came the fun - pin tucks! I was going to use this as a tutorial for pin tucks, but once again no camera. I'll be making a shirt with tucks soon though, so look for a tutorial on them coming up! I did tucks along the front of the shirt to help shape it.


The black straps in front were looking a little plain to me, so I added rows of stitching to give it some texture. I like the effect!


I then made a lining for the top yoke part, and attached it to the main shirt piece. At this point I had a shirt with a yoke that didn't actually connect at the shoulders - I kept the two straps seperate. I wasn't sure what I would do next, but I knew I wanted to do something cool. I was cleaning out some crafting drawers at the same time as making this, and remembered something I saw earlier... black bias tape remnants! Aha!

So, the two straps are connected with three bias tape strips each. I really like that detail, and was pretty impressed with myself on that one! :)
Unbelted, the shirt has a swing, trapezy look to it. For the pictures (and for most of the time I wear it), it's belted with a stretched out braided headband I scored at forever 21 for a buck.


Ta da!



1 comment:

  1. I really really love this top but I am NEW to sewing (I just got a sewing machine yesterday). Is there any way you could do a super in debth version of how you did this? Please?

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