Sweet Shirt

 Several years ago, my doll friend John in Australia sent a parcel that included about a meter of a Japanese sweets print.  He had used a bit for doll clothes, and I probably will use the leftover pieces for doll clothes, but, in the meantime, I made this

The pattern is Simplicity 6290 from 1974, view 2 (with alternate sleeves)

and I hadn't made since 2015. (I had forgotten that I'd blogged about it, and had super extra forgotten that it was "roomy" back then.  It's a much closer fit now.)

I was working with a very limited amount of fabric, so no hope of being able to pattern match  I tried to make sure the pattern elements didn't repeat on either side of the front opening--which worked above the empire seam, but not so much below.

The pattern element repeat is a bit offset, so it doesn't have that "clunky clone tool" look that annoys me so much.  I can live with it.

This print offered a lot of options for button coordination; I went with faux horn buttons in the same shades of golden brown as the cookies and pastries.

For the sleeves,  I started with the short sleeve I copied from New Look 6217 to keep with the highly modified Burda 7831.  I cut the sleeves last, so I could use the amount of fabric left to determine how big I could cut the sleeves.  I cut the first sleeves by laying out the pattern piece and cutting around it in a way to add height over the sleeve cap, then sliding the pattern piece over to add width and cutting back down to the pattern piece.  Then I flipped that cut piece of cloth over and used it to cut the other sleeve, just barely finding enough width to cut it.  The print direction may not be the same from one sleeve to the other.

Elastic was applied by zigzagging it to the inside of the sleeve edge, then folding that to the inside and zigzagging again.  This method is so annoying to fix if it needs to be re-sewn, but is my favorite for ensuring even gathering and making sure the elastic doesn't even have a chance to twist.

As with the last time I mad this shirt, I used a different fabric for the facing.  It was pure chance that I happened to have a reasonably close blue.

I haven't tacked the facings down to the shoulder seams or back darts--I'll give the shirt a chance to see if it needs that.

Inside seams finished with serging (still so happy I finally convinced myself to change the dull fixed blade in my serger.)  The bottom hem was pressed up 5/8", then that was pressed in half, then stitched along the edge of that fold from the inside without worrying about being a precise distance from the lower edge.

I decided to restrain my top stitch urges and limited myself to a single line of edge stitching along every seam.

(I couldn't coax everything to line up quite so well on the other side seam)

And the back! Since it's a vintage pattern, there are shoulder darts.

Maybe I'll make this pattern again in less than seven years?  We'll see.