Sheer & Black

One of the fabrics I got in that Fabric Mart order was a low price nylon point d'espirit netting.  Something about the grungy dark olive ground, with pink-accented white flowers outlined in black, made me think it needed to be a peasant-style blouse, to layer under jumpers when the weather warms up.

Now, while the existence of (most of) these jumpers still remains theoretical, the shirt is a reality.

 

The basic pattern is Simplicity 9866, once again severely mis-used.  I know a shirt like this could be cut freehand--I've done it in doll size--but I don't quite trust myself on that, so having an approximate pattern to use is nice.

When I had the idea and ordered the fabric, I figured I'd make the elastic casings by folding the edges--however, once I had the fabric in my hands, that just didn't seem right.  So!  Into the lace stash I went. 

I don't have a lot of options in large yardage, and even fewer when looking at coordinating colors, but there were still enough choices that I waffled for a while between black laces.  I settled on this one, hoping that the way  both edges were scalloped would look interesting once it was sewn on and the elastic added.

I didn't want any fabric raw edges visible, so I sewed the lace to the inside and flipped it to the outside before stitching the other side of the elastic channel, which also encased the fabric edge.  And then that enclosed edge ended up under the black elastic once it was inserted.

And, oof, inserting the somewhat soft elastic into a just-right-sized channel made from stretchy materials...took about an hour, with about 50 minutes devoted to getting the last 6" inside after sewing the ends together. (This is not hyperbole--I grumbled about it in a Discord chat, so I had timestamps.)

I know I could have said "good enough" and cut the elastic and sewed the ends together again to make it shorter, but I was wearing one of the dresses made with the hacked 9866, and wanted the neckline in this shirt to be lower than the neckline I saw when I looked in the mirror.

I finished the cuffs the same way, although I was able to use a small remaining amount of a narrower black elastic, so there were no struggles to get those all the way inside the channels.

And I did french seams throughout.  They probably ended up taking up more than 5/8" total width each, but this kind of shirt is extremely forgiving of things like that.

The lower hem was folded double as it was sewn, using the magnetic seam guide to set the stitch depth and a lot of eyeballing to figure out how much to fold as I went.  No-one will ever see it when worn.

Oh!  The more challenging aspect of working with this fabric is the fact that it's hard to tell the front from the back at a glance, especially when you're up close to it while working, but, from a distance, it was more obvious.  The easiest way to tell which side was which was by the words on the selvedge, but of course that wasn't helpful for most the cut pieces.  I eventually got the idea to put a safety pin on the right side of each piece after it was cut.  No mistaking which side was which after that!  I just...couldn't think about the french seam process too much, or I would start to doubt I was doing things right.  Trust the process and all that.