Pragueress

My partner left for Prague on the weekend on very short notice, and I have been slightly out of sorts. (The trip is for an interesting and cool reason, not a sad one, but still! Prague is very far away! It was a strange few days of planning and scrambling around.) To console myself, and without anyone else's television-watching preferences or sleep schedule to take into consideration, I have been sewing noisily at all hours.

The weekend's project was getting started on a collection of plain black shirts to give as a welcome-back-from-Prague gift. I found a nice lightweight linen blend on sale at Fabricland, of all places, and went to town. J. prefers loose-fitting shirts with slashed neck openings and long, wide sleeves and no buttons, which are terribly difficult to find in a store; Folkwear #104 is basically his Platonic ideal of a shirt, though, so I cut out pieces to make three of them. (I did make another a couple of months ago from IL019, a slightly heavier linen. No pictures are forthcoming because he has barely taken it off since I finished it, and right now it too is in Prague.)



Cutting out the pieces seems to take only a little less time than sewing them together. Assembly is basically sewing in straight lines—those excellent square armholes!—so most of the seams are flat felled seams, which makes me feel good about their longevity. (However, the sewing-in-the-bottom-of-a-bucket effect when you try to flat fell a sleeve seam so stresses me out that I didn't bother; the sleeves have French seams instead.)

Plain black shirts in the evening half-light are so impossibly boring to look at that I almost didn't bother with a picture, but here is one neck:



I was timid about notches at first, but now they are my favourite part, because they really reward bravery. It is a joy to carefully clip perilously close to the stitching line and end up with a slash that doesn't pucker.