Christmas FO: The QVC Shirt

Back in early November or thereabouts, my mom bought a shirt off of  QVC that she and my sister, Kelly, immediately fell in love with. She ordered it in 2 colors for herself, but my sister wanted one as well and asked if I could copy it for her Christmas gift. It was a fairly simple t-shirt design, so I knew it would be simple to copy, so I said yes :) The glory of this project was that the shirt already fit great, so I didn't have to do much in the way of alterations.

Since this is technically a wearable muslin, we picked fabric from my stash that had a similar body as the original. The inspiration shirt was a medium weight bamboo rayon, so the closest thing I had that was not too precious was this cotton interlock. The body is similar and Kelly liked the color, so I went with that. Not having matching thread in my stash, I used a medium gray thread and it blends in wonderfully.

The shirt has princess seams on the front and back and the area below the bust flares slightly on each piece to drape away from the body. After sewing the whole thing together I did have Kelly try it on before hemming just to see where she wanted the sleeves to hit, etc. We went with this 3/4 length just below the elbow. I also copied the neckline finish where a band is applied and then folded completely to the inside and then top stitched with a double needle. This is one of my favorite neckline finishes now and I've used it on all of my boat neck shirts as it's so nice and clean looking but still sturdy.

The fabric is prone to wrinkle (being cotton), but these pictures were taken after wearing it at work all day, so not too bad. We kept the slight high-lo hem of the original shirt that gave good butt coverage, which Kelly liked. The shirt is almost tunic length but not quite.

The flare around the hips creates a nice "skirt" if you will. It's pretty wide when you pull the hem out all the way, but with the drape of the fabric it still hangs nicely.

So that's Kelly's Christmas shirt - the QVC shirt as I call it. I included the pattern I made of the shirt as part of her gift because she wants to learn to sew t-shirts too, so we should be making more of these some time. Kelly wear this quite often - she says it's very comfy :) It needs a few tweaks on the next version (like a full bust adjustment of some kind), but it certainly fits as well as the original shirt and that's all we were really aiming for with this. I'm just glad she gets some wear out of this gift.

Summary:
Fabric: 2.5 yards of taupe cotton interlock knit (thrifted)
Pattern: Drafted from a rtw shirt from QVC
Notions: grey thread, gray woolly nylon thread
Time: 3 hours