Simple Summer Shirts - Red and orange Plaid gauze

Now that summer has finally arrived I'd started to find all the holes in my summer wardrobe - and boy are there a lot of them.  Mainly in the basics - T shirts and shorts.

I've been working on the shorts but figured I needed a few new shirts to go with them.  The first one I started with was my red and orange plaid shirt.

Got to say I don't really love the way this shirt turned out - and yet I imagine that I'll wear it quite a bit anyway.   Why?  Its the fabric - I just love the way this fabric feels to wear. It's a cotton gauze fabric so lightweight and breezy.  I've used it in the blue purple colourway a couple of times. First to make this shirt and then for this dress and whilst neither of them are the most flattering pieces in my wardrobe they are some of the most worn simply because they feel great to wear, and I assume this shirt will end up the same.

When it comes to a pattern I sort of made this up as I went along.  I was thinking of some sort of peasant type blouse with a square neckline, gathering at the shoulders but it never quite worked.

I started with the pattern I used to make this shirt.  Its a self drafted pattern for a dolman sleeve, princess seam woven top.  The princess seam for this shirt starts in the shoulder and I thought that I could remove the princess seam but leave the dart at the shoulder and gather that extra fabric for a really flowy top - well that failed abysmally so the first thing I did was to remove that extra fabric by adding a dart coming down from my shoulder.

The next issue to deal with was this it was just too big all around.  This fabric is quite crinkly and has a lot of mechanical stretch so using a woven pattern just made the top way too big.  In the end I took a 2 inch seam up the back for a total of 4 inches out of the back.  Obviously no pattern matching could be done at this point - I made sure everything lined up horizontally but the vertical stripes I just have to deal with.

I looked at many ways to finish the neckline and decided in the end on a simple facing.  I used a cotton fabric as the facing making it the size I wanted my neckline and gathered the fabric to fit, but even after that the front was still way too big, so I took an inverted box pleat at the center of the neckline and it now sits nicely.   But it's now a trapezoid neckline rather than the square I was originally looking for. (plus the darts are no longer in the right place)

I finished the sleeves simply by serging them and turning them under and stitching - I don't love it but can't think of anything better to do.  The hem is a simple double turned 1/2" hem.

So it's noting great, but it's certainly wearable.  I still have quite a bit of the fabric left over -- I wonder what pattern I can use to finally make a something fabulous out of this fabric!