Stash Building - A Spectacular Effort :-(

I'm actually having a go at myself in the title - I shouldn't be stash building! I already have plenty of stash, but it's just so hard to resist (a) something really lovely that whispers 'I have so much potential' to me, or (b) something cheap. If it falls into both categories forget it!

It'd be pretty embarrassing to show you all my purchases at that Tessuti remnant sale I mentioned in  Saturday's post, but here are the pretties:

• a mustard yellow net with large silver sequin pattern in the bottom half, and a dusty pink pure silk with small silver sequin pattern all over - both of great interest to my sparkle-loving daughter:

 

•  this silvery fabric which will be used in a costume for my son if he tells me he's interested in it:

• a patterned lightweight cotton that I would like to make into a summer blouse (yes, there is enough of it - about 2 metres), and a small piece of heavily embroidered stripey cotton that my daughter insists be made into a dress (no, there's really not enough - maybe I should call all the Tessuti shops and see if they have any more scraps of this!):

 

• some mostly small pieces of coloured pure silk - apart from the three shown below I also got some dark blues that I didn't manage to photograph well.  I would love to try my hand at colour blocking with some of these; maybe in a simple loose, A-line dress?

I also got some sensibles - good lengths of crepe, silk jersey, wool/poly and masses of something that looks like ticking but is more like sheet weight.  It worked out at less than $5 per metre... is it excusable?

Vogue 9441 (OOP)

Vogue 9441 is a pattern I think I came across in my local op shop. The pattern's not a spectacular-looking thing, but I thought the green version ("C") might be a reasonable basic shirt, and although I know the sizing has changed since the 70s the shirt was described as "loose-fitting".  When I'm sewing I usually start with a 12, and I assumed that a loose 70s shirt might be like a normal shirt these days... I didn't bother with a muslin, and I only checked the dimensions of the pattern pieces in a pretty desultory manner.

Interestingly the sizing just felt 'off' for me. Maybe women in the 70s were expected to have thin upper arms and narrow shoulders, but this shirt felt restrictive around these areas when basted together, so I sewed narrower seams to add some more room. I think it looks really nice hanging from a tree, even when not completely finished - because I love the striped summery Japanese cotton from Tessuti ...

 

but when it's on, it looks terrible - certainly not at all loose-fitting:

 

 not even when disguised by a child in a car!

Pattern Modifications:
The band down the shirt front goes rather low, so instead I made it just as long as I thought it would need to be to get on and off.  But in a slapdash way I slashed a little too far down the centre front. This is why I've had to expose the lower edges of the band rather than neatly stitch together, turn inside out and top stitch in place.

I also left off the pocket from the left front because I didn't think my thin cotton would cope with the strain of a pocket.

Comments on the pattern:
I tried to follow the pattern step by step but I should have studied it more thoroughly before sewing; if I had I would've used a different approach on the neck band.  Not that this makes any difference to the fit, which is the real issue. Anyway, the pattern has the right side of the collar sewn into the wrong side of the shirt before you pin the basted edge of collar over the seam (on the outside of the shirt), baste, stitch close to edge, and finally topstitch.  I would have preferred to attach the collar to the shirt the other way around so I could finish up hand sewing the edge of the collar to the shirt on the inside of the shirt.

So here's the question. I've hemmed the edges and sewn down the collar, so all that's left to do are cuffs and closures - but is this shirt worth finishing? I think it would fit my sister-in-law, but would she want it?