Happy Spring?!?

So here's what you can do with one yard of fabric and an old dress shirt:

The pattern calls for 1 3/8 yards of fabric, but I had this random yard lying around. Easter-egg-like, no? With some finagling, and by cutting the front facing out of one of Clark's worn-out, light-blue oxfords, we've got ourselves a shell. The button is one of the collar buttons from the dress shirt, too. As my mother would say, make do what have. For example, if you don't have any pronouns lying around, verbs'll do.

I used this pattern:

I made the upper-right version, but the neckline was, like, choking me. Clark said it looked like a Roman tunic -- I guess it wasn't the lead dishes that did them in; their clothes were throttling them. I could have recut it using one of the other views, but that seemed like too much work, since the widths of the shoulders are significantly different. An oval dinner platter saved the day -- I traced part of it onto the front with a fade-out marker and restitched it. The change narrowed the shoulder slightly at the neck, so the back had to be adjusted anyway, but it turned out well and I was proud of myself for figuring that out.

I'll probably make this pattern again but plan to make both facings in contrasting fabric for a nifty look. No zipper, no buttonhole (a thread loop is used instead), with careful cutting you can do it with one meager yard o' fabric -- I'll make one for every day of the week, and two for Sundays.

And thanks very much for all your recent comments! The swamp is sort of more of a bog now, but it's all right because I'm teaching a course about Ireland this quarter and parts of that great land are all bog, all the time. So it's all good.

Comments

[Dana]

your top turned out terrificly well! i only wish it were warm enough to wear it now! i am tired of winter. :( hope all is well and hope to see you soon.

[rachel]

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