The long awaited shirt post

The reason I haven't updated anything lately is that I've been travelling for work these past two weeks. I spent some time in New York, the vast majority of it at work. I did make it to the fashion district once though - I left Mood with 3 yards of the most beautiful yellow silk shantung and some pretty buttons for my forthcoming projects. I just need to decide what to use it on now.

I promised in my last I would post about my new shirt, and I've been meaning to do so all this time: it was a matter of finally taking pictures.

This shirt is a straight B6035 in size 10. The only change I made was to add about 0.5cm to the shoulder width. This first pic was taken as soon as I put it on (gorgeous view from the hotel window, wasn't it?):

I feel that the top part has the perfect amount of ease. I was wondering while wearing it lately if I should take future versions in around the hips a bit - it looks all right in the pictures, but I feel it's too wide there when wearing it. Actually it looks a bit like a peplum when I look in the mirror.

Here it is on the dress form. It doesn't look great because it has been worn to work for a whole day (well actually, I did work-airplane-work, so technically a bit more than a day - I need to devise a system for this):

This shirt marked two firsts for me. The first time I inserted proper sleeves and the first time I made buttonholes. Both these turned out ok, although I don't like that the sleeves are so puffy at the insertion point:

I think this is by design of this particular type of sleeve, and hope that the longer sleeve length of this patten won't look like this. I don't mind it so much in this version since the sleeves are meant to be puffy at the band but I generally dislike "puffness".

I strayed a bit from the buttonhole placement and skipped the buttonhole on the collar. I never button shirts all the way up anyway. Usually I keep the collar button unbuttoned, as well as the first button on the center. Instead of making a collar buttonhole, I stitched 4 buttons, 2 on each side, for decorative purposes. I got the buttons at Ray Stitch:

Image from raystitch.co.uk

I had originally meant to use the white side of the buttons for the whole shirt, but in the end I thought they looked a bit too shiny, so I used the other side. I did, however, include two white side buttons on the collar:

I discovered don't like sewing buttons by machine. Out of the 4 buttons in the picture above, 3 are sewn by hand, and the one with thread sticking out is sewn by machine. I sewed all the center buttons by macine, and one of them shows similarly hanging threads (I tried to cut them, but even so they don't look great). The next make will feature hand stitched buttons.

Here are the other buttons, together with the princess seams. Because I wanted the inside of the shirt to look good, but didn't want to zig zag it, I went for a solution where I turned the seam allowance in and stitched. Afterwards, I figured that topstitching the seam allowance to the body of the shirt would look pretty good as well.

I used this technique on the princess seams, and used flat felled seams everywhere else but the sleeves. I didn't really know what to do with the sleeves so I just turned the seam allowance in. I have, in the meanwhile, paid a lot of attention to other people's shirts and discovered that most of them use flat felled seams at the sleeve insertion point.

I cut the next version already, with the same puffy sleeves. I think I'll switch and cut the longer sleeves instead. The new make is using a flowery cotton, which isn't shirting cotton. I find shirting cotton very difficult to iron properly, so I'll keep from it for a little while.