Melilot shirt

On my beach weekend I made two shirts - nothing extraordinary about that except that I went out on a limb and used a pdf pattern. Which I have been firmly resisting, despite all the bloggers and cool people being very dismissive of the big four pattern companies, and raving about indie designers and how much better the fit is, and the ideas, and the rest. Which is all fine, except they mostly do pdf patterns that you have to download and print out yourself, and I do love the tissue paper in the pattern envelope. I know where I stand with a big wodge of Butterick brown paper. However, in the interests of life-long learning, I had a go.

I printed off forty-odd pages of A4 paper, trimmed the edges, and taped them together. I cut out the shapes, taped them some more because I had put the tape in completely the wrong places, and then cut out the fabric as normal and meandered my way through some fairly terse instructions to make a shirt. Two shirts. It is the Deer and Doe Melilot shirt which has been very popular and there were a lot of pictures and hints on the internet, which was very useful.

And it turned out great! As usual these are terrible photos taken at the end of the work day (which is why the rumples) but it was a lovely shirt to wear - a pink checked cotton with a slight amount of stretch that was gifted to me by a work friend, score! This is actually the second shirt, so it has a fit adjustment around my swollen left arm that makes it sit a bit better. The first shirt is also nice but it was a cheapo printed rayon - quite nice and drapey but a curse to sew. Slippery. The first shirt had the full collar, the second one just the mandarin collar.

This is a great pattern, simple to sew, nice shaping and good details. I measured myself and did the size suggested, grading between sizes as needed, and it worked fine apart from the unusually bulging left arm. Taping all those pieces of paper together was a tremendous pain in the arse, and while I was doing it I thought "never again, this is stupid" but then doing the sewing and wearing the finished product it has some significant advantages over the standard big four patterns I usually use. I might be a convert? Maybe?