Y’know, this should come as a shock to no one, but not everything I sew is a winner. And by “winner” I mean, “a garment that I want to wear first every time it comes out of the laundry and suits my style and my lifestyle perfectly”. Not “a garment that was sewn really well using a really nice fabric and fits well”. Because this blog post is about something that falls in the latter category and not the former. Here’s my first ever Merchant & Mills garment: The Dress Shirt!
When I say that this pattern is not a winner, I mean that it isn’t great for me. I don’t mean that it’s a bad pattern, because I know a lot of people love this pattern and love Merchant & Mills, and honestly, the construction on this was really cool and I liked sewing it a lot. It just feels kind of…meh. I don’t feel like it suits my style, but I can’t really put my finger on why I think that. This colour is a colour I gravitate toward and wear quite a bit, so it’s not that. I think it’s the tunic-y nature of this. The pattern did not start out as a tunic, either! I cut out the full length of the pattern and then when I tried it on before hemming, found it quite long on me so I chopped off 9 3/4″. Which is a LOT! I’m 5’4″, for reference. The next weirdness is totally my fault, because when I cut it off, I wasn’t being the most…fastidious sewist, and the curve on the hemline ended up a bit odd. Which I didn’t notice until I’d hemmed it, looked down, and realized it was flipping up on the front AND back and also the curve was too far out from the side seams so the front and back looked like there was a strange crotch/buttcrack flap going on. Which is not a good look for many (any?) people. It honestly also still felt too long. I know, I might just be saying this to excuse my other issues, but honestly, it was! So I chopped it off straight across at the level of the stitching for my hem at the side seams. No way was I spending a bunch of time unpicking a hem just to preserve an extra 1/2″ at the side seam! And this is the length I kept. I realize this was a lot of negative stuff all up front, but I promise, there are good things! Keep reading!
I cut the bib on the bias to add some stripe detail, since this Mariner cloth (by Alison Glass) has a really lovely textured stripe in it. Although, for the record, I mean the point to go downward and not up, but it was a combination of accidentally mis-positioning my pieces AND being very short on fabric which meant the pieces wouldn’t have fit the other way even if I’d noticed earlier. There’s a separate un-pieced pattern piece for the bib lining, which was very helped to use as a reference when sewing with the bib as a single piece later since the bias cut made my exterior fabric pieces distort a little bit. The way the neckline is finished on the Dress Shirt is really interesting, and something I’d never seen before. You sew the bib together at the neckline and then snip the seam allowance, flip it over and press them wrong sides together, then you use kind of a reverse sewing order on the yoke (sewing shoulder seams and back neck at the same time instead of sewing the back of the yoke first) in order to finish the back neck separately. It turned out very neat and tidy and I really liked it! I wanted to use the burrito method on the yoke, but it’s too narrow to fit all of the fabric inside, so I couldn’t. Maybe I could’ve based on the length I ended up with, but at the time I had the full dress length still going on, so it was way too bulky!
Things I really like about this pattern: the bib design detail! The construction method! The really really wide hem on the sleeves (I’m pointing to the stitch line in the photo above because it was really hard to see). Before I forget, there’s supposed to be a pleat at the bottom of the bib, but I decided to take it out and I don’t regret that decision – voluminous A-line things don’t usually suit me. I made a size 12, which is the smaller of the two sizes I fell between. The shoulders fit really great, so I think I made the right decision in that regard since everything else on the Dress Shirt is loose. The fabric is another thing I love – it’s SO soft and falls really nicely, I think it would be great for other dresses. I used leftover fabric from my Wiksten shift dress for the yoke facing and the bib facing. It’s a really lightweight fabric and conveniently suited the colour palette, and I love the little sneaky detail on the inside.
So, that’s the Dress Shirt. I honestly don’t know if I’d make another Merchant & Mills pattern. Though it’s a case of “it’s not you, it’s me”, because I loved their pattern instructions, their construction method, the fit chart was pretty accurate (and they include lots of finished garment measurements), and it all came together as they intended. The issue is that I don’t think my style jives with the Merchant & Mills style. I have seen this pattern look great on other people, which is the main reason I wanted to try it in the first place. This was a planned out project – I bought the fabric and the pattern at the same time at Patch, intending them to go together, and I’m glad I followed through on my intention/plans! But it just wasn’t a huge win for me, and I am not sure if I’ll wear it that much! I will give the disclaimer that I am speaking as a teacher currently working from home wearing very comfy clothes like sweatshirts and sweatpants very frequently, and no one is looking at me, so this MIGHT find a place in my wardrobe once I’m actually leaving the house to go to work again. It’s really comfortable, and the sleeves have a great range of motion which would be optimal for teaching cello and bass. While I’m talking about not leaving the house, can I say that I feel like this blog is becoming a strange documentation of the timeline of my weird hair as a result of not having a haircut since October? I just need to put it out into the world that this is not what I actually WANT my hair to look like. Desperate times, folks.
