What I am wearing to work tomorrow

A while back I got to work on Butterick 5284 .On the face of it this is a fairly standard shirt pattern with some variations in collars, a ruffle front and sort of winged sleeves. I checked out some of the work beautiful sewers had done on Pattern Review (which I have decided to start contributing to, since I so often go there myself for advice) and decided on me to go with only one detail in this shirt so I just made a plain shirt with the cuffs only. I  have left the ruffled front for a later version on its own with ordinary sleeves.

Two comments about the pattern. For a start there is no way that the line drawing does justice to the dramatic shape of these sleeves, which was just fine with me. Tomorrow I am wearing this to work with a navy straight skirt and if I didn't have these crazy sleeves I am sure in a white blouse and navy skirt I would look like some kind of convent school escapee or a missionary at least.

No chance of that now.

I am sorry though that I don't have a shot of this on me, all you get is it hanging on the bathroom door ready for tomorrow, but my photographers are out and about right now. Maybe later, and I can update this post. The colour is weird too but this really is a white shirt you have to trust me on this.

One word about construction. The button bands are separate pieces that are stitched on, which annoyed me because I had just done a very nice men's shirt where of course they are just folded cleverly over and look very neat. In this the pattern however they also asked you to interface both bands. Think about that, this means 6 layers, two of them interfacing, plus another 4 layers of seam allowances, all happening in a 1 inch band (that would be 10 thicknesses on the edges). Of course when I did this I realized my nice little broadcloth blouse had something like a ruler running down the middle of it, both unattractive and homemade looking I thought. So I unpicked the band on one edge ( I had topstitched at this point and was worried about destroying the blouse totally with too many needle holes) and trimmed away the interfacing best I could. It least then it didn't have the rigid front look.

If I had to do it over again, and I really suggest you think about this if you make this blouse/shirt, leave the interfacing out all together.

Other than this though a pretty sharp shirt.