Summer Shirts

April has been kind of crazy lately. First there was the blizzard and recently the ‘heat-wave’. In terms of my wardrobe, it has been a mixture of heavy and lightweight garments all intermingled together. However, I do sense calmness in the air and my fingers are crossed that summer will be making a great appearance after the preview we had recently.

As usual, I am making some staple garments for my wardrobe and while browsing the internet, I saw some amazing hand dyed fabric from Jaipur. I was salivating over the colour and the prints and in the end, I bought two prints, one called ‘Shibori Pink’ and the other ‘Minnie Navy’.

When the fabric arrived, I realised that it was quite narrow (110 cm) and I may have problems fitting my pattern on. But I thought of an ingenious albeit lazy solution; I eliminated the side seams. Most of my shirts are quite loosely fitted anyway so losing some side seams won’t come at any loss. And on a positive note, it also means less sewing to do. After all, additional seams costs time and money.

As a way to get around the narrowness of the fabric, I also cut a strip and sewed it on the centre front of the shirt. With the strip folded back on the seam line, you can hardly notice anything out of the ordinary.

As I was placing the pattern on the second piece of fabric, I realised that both of these fabrics are actually  different widths with one much wider. It goes to show that you can’t really trust the manufacturer’s information and should always buy with a back up plan in place. To circumvent this, I added a pleat on the back of the shirt of the wider fabric.

Both shirts took me an afternoon to sew. A strange as it may seem, I don’t actually look forward to sewing, especially the same items of garment in a short space of time. But the urge to have something new to wear got the better of me and I put me head down, turned the music on (loudly) and allowed my mind to go blank while I am sewing. I guess I’ve done it so many times that the sewing process is nothing I am particularly worried about.

This was the first shirt I sewed and while sewing the second one, I followed the manufacturer’s advice and washed it at 40 degrees with a handful of salt. As the fabric was hand dyed, this should fix the colour to prevent it from running.

When I did the same for this ‘Shibori Pink’ fabric, the colour did bleed a bit but I wasn’t overly worried about it as this was the nature of hand dyed fabric. However, I must remember never to wash this shirt with my whites!