I wanted a big, billowy, dramatic shirt hanging open, and turned a sketch into reality. The right fabric to make it out of was incredibly elusive and only emerged last minute while searching at my fourth stop, completely dejected and desperate. There it was! This incredible silk hybrid with unique texturing. There are shimmery ridges almost like windswept sand going in one direction, and in the other---lord, I don't know what to call them. Cracks, scratches? Like stone ruins or a tree trunk. It was sooo "goblin king", I had to.

It was my first time doing a yoke with gathers, and although there are numerous tutorials online for how to sew a yoke once you have a pattern, there was nothing about how to draft a pattern for a gathered yoke, which involved quite a bit of altering to the original shape. I had to figure it out by myself by applying techniques like you'd see if you were drafting a leg of mutton sleeve. It worked mostly, but the fabric is slightly rigid and wasn't keen on being prettily gathered -- it mostly wanted to bubble around my basting and just be weird like that, but I got something going on in front. This quality made gathering the sleeves equally hard if not harder, and once they were gathered they also had to be pleated, and ironed, just so they didn't look like big poofy pillows hanging off my wrists.

It was my second time doing plackets, and this kind was a lot easier. It just involved cutting a slit in the sleeve, and creating bias tape from the fabric to go all around. Then it all gets inserted into the cuff, like usual. I really liked the simplicity and appearance of it.