The Other Half of the Shirt

The shirt is finally finished. It took much longer than I expected. Here it is finished, first of all--and no, I'm not wearing my corset because I just ate a burger and fries and two cookies and I'm not sure I could fasten it at the moment. Also I'm wearing my glasses. On the plus side, I just got my hair cut today.

My first step was to hem the, the--what the hell is that called, anyway? I just searched Wikipedia with no luck. Let's call it the placket in the middle of the neckline, even though technically it's not a placket. Anyway, my first step was to hem the placket and add grommets. Now that I know how to add grommets, I can see I'll be adding them to everything. I laced the placket up with more of the cord cut from the extra laces from my corset (although if I keep eating like I did today, I'm going to have to loosen the cords again).

I tried it on to see what it looked like, and oops. No matter how tightly I pulled the laces, I was showing an awful lot of cleavage. I decided to make a modesty panel.

I was messing around with various fabrics to see what would look best when I noticed a yard of feather tape I'd bought off etsy on a whim, months ago, but never found a use for. The feathers are short and small compared to the feather tape I used to trim my petticoat. On impulse I held them up to the placket, and loved the effect.

So I sewed a piece of feather tape on either side of the placket, feathers pointing in. They hide what I need to hide and look good too. I worried they'd tickle, but they don't.

After that I had to do the sleeves. I did a terrible job. I ended up adding three layers of fabric to each sleeve and I still don't like the effect, but I'm tired of fooling with it so it'll have to do. I trimmed each layer in feather-like scallops.

Incidentally, I stabbed my thumb badly last night while working on the sleeves. Then I stepped on a sewing needle and drove it right up into my bare foot. If it had been the same needle both times, that might have been understandable. Instead, I got up to deal with my bleeding thumb, came back and sat down at the computer to tweet about it (tweeting about an event is the most important part of an event, right?), then stood up to go back to sewing, at which point I accidentally knocked a loose needle off the computer desk, it fell into the pile of the carpet point-up, and I stepped on it. This is why I didn't finish the shirt until tonight.

If all goes well, I should have photos up of me in my full DragonCon outfit, probably on Sunday. And these will be real pictures, not selfies taken in the dirty mirror in the garage. It will be epic.