Made by a Fabricista: Tencel Chambray Recital Shirt

Hello Fabric Mart Fabricistas! I'm Meg and I'm new here! I'm really delighted to be blogging here for Fabric Mart on occasion. You can also find me at my blog, Cookin' and Craftin', in between my posts here!

For my first project with Fabric Mart, I chose this killer Aegean Blue rayon/tencel chambray... it's a lovely color with a cool, slightly nubby texture. The chambray has a great hand: nice and drapey but also perfectly crisp when pressed... ideal for shirtmaking! It also looked fabulous as a jumpsuit, as Tiffany demonstrated here recently!

Speaking of shirts, I made the Liesl + Co Recital Shirt, a princess seamed shirt with a pleated, tuxedo-style front. I love the versions of the Liesl + Co Classic shirt I made earlier this year, and Liesl said the Recital Shirt was based on the same block, with many of the same details, so it was a no-brainer to try out this pattern!

Let's be up front about one fact: the pleats on this shirt are not my best work. I don't know what happened, but somewhere along the line, between the pattern tracing (wow, the lines for all those pleats were very close together!), fabric marking and remarking (I used a Clover Chaco Liner, but the chalk lines seemed to disappear before I got to sewing the pleats, so I had to re-do them), and the sewing, things went embarrassingly awry. They are all different sizes and different spacing!

But once they were done, I couldn't bear to unpick them. The thread I used so closely matched the fabric that it would have been impossible to remove it! I decided that, although you eagle-eyed sewists can clearly see my mistakes, your average Joe likely won't notice it. I never claimed to be a perfectionist. (BTW, have you listened to the Love to Sew Podcast on perfectionism? Worth a listen!). I moved on and finished the rest of the shirt.

So, back to the rest of the shirt: I feel like I made up for my mistakes with the pleats with the rest of the details: my collar is crisp, my tower plackets nicely topstitched, cuffs cleanly sewn, and buttonholes blameless. Everything went swimmingly after the pleat disaster! The only fit changes I made were to do a full bicep adjustment of 1", which I also did for my Classic Shirts.

I love some of the details; the little pointy, fold-over collar, in particular. I had perfectly matching buttons in my stash, which was fortuitous!

I like, but don't love the final shirt. I adore the fabric, but the shirt feels a bit oversized. When I wear it untucked it looks a bit sloppy. It's nice tucked in, although I need to find the right pants to wear with it. Here I've paired it with my True Bias Lander pants, but maybe I need to wear slimmer trousers to counteract the slightly oversized shirt?

I'm looking forward to making this shirt again and perfecting both the fit and those pleats!

Thanks again to Fabric Mart for having me and to you for reading this far! I'll be back here in a few months to share my next project, but in the meantime, pop by my blog to read more about my other projects!