Bruyére the First

Hello to all of your beautiful faces! Spring has officially sprung and I can't wait for when I can shove that coat deep into the depths of my closet, hide my boots somewhere I can't see them and bask myself in the sweet-sweet warmth of the sun. Maybe, just maybe, I can even get a tan again this year! That would be two years in a row! And I know that everyone asked "What tan?" when I said that I had the best tan I had had in my life last year but that's the glory of being pale. You tan, feel super proud of your tan and you could still be mistaken for a swan. Anywhooooooo. That's not what I wanted to share with you today, but whatever. Not deleting that sooooo... Meeh. Here's the real post.

This is my "wearable" muslin for the Bruyére shirt by Deer and Doe. When it came out last fall, I was instantly loving the look of it. A simple buttonfront shirt with pleats and that is long enough to cover your bum so you can wear it with tights? Don't mind if I do. I didn't feel like making a real muslin so I decided to use a fabric I wouldn't feel sad about if the shirt ended up being a huge fitting fail or if the fit was kind of off and it got demoted into a "at home" shirt. So I took a piece of dark blue polyester fabric and a bit of bright blue to make the shirt look more alive.

After consulting my measurements and size chart, I traced and cut out size 42 and made no modifications to the pattern pieces. I followed the instructions exactly like they were written and thought they were relatively clear. I did jump between the English and French instructions because the English instruction had all the measurements in inches and I feel a lot more comfortable with cm but now I've written the corresponding cm measurements to the English envelope with my own little shaky hand so no going back and forth between the two in the future.

I decided to serge all the seams instead of french seaming because ain't nobody got time fo dat, if it's a wearable muslin. And let me tell you, I am happy I did not put that much effort into this thing. Because whatever is going on with the dark blue fabric, it makes my skin itch. So far only organic wool yarns have made my skin itch like that but that fabric does not have any wool in it. It is flat out polyester and feels like yuck on my skin. I've tried to suffer through a day in this shirt but unless I put a longsleeve under it, I will want to scrape my skin off with a sandpaper.

Okay. So about the fit. The waist is a bit too big under the bust, so I'm going to have to take in the front waistband and play around with the shape of the bust dart. The shoulder was a bit too long, so for the next version I'm going to have to shorten the shoulder by 1cm. The sleeve is also a bit too wide. You can clearly see that the sleeve is Fifty Shades of Baggy around my arms and it also had a bit too much ease at the armhole. So it didn't really ease into the armhole and really wanted to have tiny gathers. And a fabric that is a bitch like this one, it really shows. So if you are making your first Bruyére, I recommend you make sure the sleeve eases in well and you might have to take off some of the excess ease. I also recommend considering using snap buttons instead of regular buttons because opening and closing this amount of buttons every time you wear it is really time consuming and annoying.

So. Will I be making other versions? Heck yea. I actually already have made more. And I have seriously considered burning every little piece of the itchy fabric I have left. Because nothing is worth that amount of itch. Good thing I got it from Gran S and didn't pay for it.