Back in August, I was on a mission to find a good woven t-shirt pattern. I narrowed down my pattern stash and chose New Look 6483 because of the fabric requirements hoping it would be close enough in my size to make it work. I have quite a few smaller pieces of woven fabric that would make great shirts, so this was the first step in using up a good chunk of my stash at will.
Since I was aiming for a wearable muslin, I used this freshly thrifted yellow embroidered cotton eyelet. I'm a sucker for anything embroidered, but add eyelets and I just gotta have it, so when I saw this piece for $0.50 I grabbed it. The fabric was only 1.5 yards of 44" wide, but eyelet also doesn't go all the way to the edges, so this was more like 40" or narrower. While cutting out the pieces, I discovered the person who wrote the price on the piece of masking tape got green permanent marker toward the middle of this cut of fabric :/ So cutting this out was a challenge to make everything fit and not show off the bare edges or the green mark.
I did lower the neckline by about 1 inch before cutting this out, which I'm very happy about. I shudder to think how high this was drafted to be. Since this was an eyelet material and I didn't want to see a facing, I used bias tape to finish the neckline, which worked out great. Once I got the pieces all assembled, I discovered just how wide the shoulders were. This time around with sewing clothes for myself, I have noticed just how narrow my shoulders really are in comparison to the measurements of the rest of me. I took 3/4" off each side, which worked out great, but it meant setting in these sleeves multiple times each.
My sleeves are slightly shorter than the pattern calls for just because of my small length of fabric I had to work with, but I actually am really happy with the length on these. They have just a rolled hem finish like the pattern suggests.
The back definitely needs a bit more alteration on my next version. This was with me curving the area above the shoulder blades in by about 1 inch but it still bulges where the keyhole is. My hair covers this when I wear it, so it's not that big a deal, but I would eventually like to figure out the curve there and scoop the neckline just slightly so I don't have to worry about a button closure. I did hand macrame a button loop and used an orphaned yellow button from my stash, which is nice. Always nice to use up pieces.
I also shortened the length with cutting this out, but in the end it turned out perfectly on me. This meant that the split side is a bit shorter than the pattern indicates. Oddly, the pattern had very limited instructions on the hem of this. I had serged the inside seams together everywhere, so when it came time to sew the split side I had to do a little futzing. It worked fine in the end and I think the outside looks good, and having serged sleeves makes this so much more washable.
And that's my shirt :) While this was just supposed to be a muslin, I love how it turned out. I wasn't convinced this color of yellow would work on me, which is why I was fine with using this as a sacrificial muslin fabric, but now I really love it. It looks very cute with a jean skirt and it's breezy and comfortable for the Florida heat without showing
too much. Weirdly, I tried to make this up in a broadcloth shortly after this make and the shoulders were such a drastic failure that I couldn't save it. I will probably need to make another one exactly like this one - meaning I won't take the shoulders in flat but wait until I'm setting in the sleeves - so that I can figure out what the difference is. When I lay this one on the pattern, the shoulders are size 8 while the body I cut out is a size 16. Crazy. I'm glad to have done this little experiment and that I got such a cute shirt out of it to boot!
Summary:
Fabric: 1.5 yards yellow eyelet cotton - $0.50
Pattern: New Look 6483 - $0.50
Notions: Bias Tape - Free, Thread - $0.25
Time: 3 Hours
Total Cost: $1.25
