SW Whistles Shirt

My latest make is the Sewing Workshop Pattern Whistles Shirt.

 The Whistles shirt is the one in the lower left  in the above picture, with the long tapered ( whistles) flanges.  The fabric is painterly panels from Noelle Phares  printed on cotton fabric. 

Noelle Phares panel print

This shirt made in Ms. Phares's panels was the the featured garment for the May Sew Confident club. A subscription service that provides kits,, instructional videos, etc. to paying members. I am not a member of the club and already had the pattern so I went out to Noelle Phares's Etsy shop and bought 4 panels that were different than the ones offered in the kits. It was a fun exercise to lay out the pattern on the panels so that the blocks of color were pleasing  in the finished shirt.  This pattern is basically a boxy shirt with extended shoulders and the different flanges.  The pattern envelope suggested a size medium for my body measurements. I made a  size small because I do not like massive ease ( 6 inches  for a size medium) in any garments I wear, even oversize ones.  

SW Whistles shirt front

SW Whistles Shirt Back

Burda Bustier Jan 1998 126

 I have always thought it would be interesting to sew  either a corset or bustier top. One with built in bra cups,  multiple vertical seamed sections below the bust in the rib area, and waist shaping.   I discovered that  bustiers are different that corsets. A bustier "boots" your bust, while a corset  cinches your waist. I  believe the top that I just finished is a  bustier style because it  fits the description of a bustier being "a sexy lingerie style that can be worn as outerwear."

I  found this top in an old issue of Burda  Jan -1998. 

 I was amused to see that it used some of the same pattern pieces as a dress, in the same issue, of the  type Burda often features for Octobre Fest.

I still had scraps of a blue plaid fabric leftover from making this skirt last summer. 

Nothing else was inspiring me at the time so I decided to use the scraps to make this top.  I was  able to cut all the pieces out of the scrap fabric. But then I discovered that  my plaid wasn't matching at some important seams. The plaid fabric had no right or wrong side and was an uneven plaid. In my enthusiasm  for using all the scraps, I turned some of them over to the wrong side, and carefully matched the plaid  only along the horizontal lines. Total forgetting about the uneven vertical lines.  So much for making this top from scraps. My local Hobby Lobby still had the fabric, so I bought another short length to fix my matching mishaps.  I added a foam bra cup between the outer fabric and the lining to hold the shape in the bust area and allow wearing sans bra if desired. Who are we kidding? My real reason was to add padding in that area! I made my own bra cups using  bra foam. I cut  the pattern pieces with no seam allowance, and zigzag stitched them together. 

The top looks like the inspiration photo and it fits, but I think it will be given away.  It is just not my style, even for wearing around the house. When I Show and Tell’d it at a recent zoom meeting, my ASG friends dared me to wear it to the next meeting (which will be in person - yah!) but I said only if it got me a free lunch.