Ah, Farewell Sweet Polo, We Hardly Knew Ye.

Here is the LAST THING I AM GOING TO POST ABOUT POLOS.  Ever.  Or at least until I think of something else I might want to say about polo shirts.  I am way sick of them at this point.  Also, my neighbor just gave me two shirts and a dress that her daughter outgrew.   We have enough polos to last awhile.   And speaking of dresses, here is the dress that she gave me:

Here is the dress that I made.  This was my last polo effort to date.  See?  It's a polo.  It's a dress.  It's a POLO DRESS.  Oooo.

(Sorry about the wacky skewed image, it's that stand-at-the-table-with-the-camera-over-my-head thing again.  I have to find the stepladder.)

BORING TECHNICAL DETIAILS: Basically, to make the dress pattern I took the bodice of my KwikSew polo pattern (aha!  something useful came out of it after all) and added extra width on each side seam tapering from nothing at the armscye to a half-inch at the bottom hem.  Then I added a big rectangle of gathered fabric for the skirt.  (I created the A-line shape for the bodice because I was afraid it would be too narrow for easy movement if I left it straight.  In retrospect, I didn’t need that added width at all.)

I didn't do much with the skirt on this one and it's a little floppy.  This particular article of clothing combined several "firsts" for me and that was just too much for my brain to deal with.  I couldn't add the extra brain-drain of trying to calculate even pleats with the very specific length of fabric I had.  Which leads me to my first "first".

Question: "Can you make a dress out of an adult-sized (albeit pretty large) polo shirt?"

Answer: "Why, yes.  Yes, you can.”

Not only was I able to squeeze all the bodice pieces into the top half of the old shirt, but I cut the sleeves from the old sleeves (thus utilizing the pre-made knit cuffs)

and used the collar (see this post about cutting down a collar). 

All that careful squishing gave me juuuuust enough fabric left over at the bottom to make the skirt. 

 

This photo is from the beginning of the school year.  SuperGirl here has grown a little since then so it fits her a little bit better.  It's still pretty floppy, though.  When I make more of these (like in the far far distant future) I might have to just cut them from actual yardage so I can have pleats instead of gathers.

So, what were  the other "firsts", you ask?  Honestly, I can't remember now.  Ack.  My brain is melted.  I have Polo Brain.   Clearly a case of Polo Brain requires extensive rest.  And possibly hot chocolate.

Oooo, but here is another “first”":  I just used Windows Live Writer to create this blog page and it is so cool!  I thought it would be dumb, but it’s way easier to do it this way than with Blogger’s tools.  So “Yay, Windows!”  Who woulda thunk?

Polo. It means “chicken”, right?

OK. So I just read this post (well, I had to, it's really really hard to write a post without actually reading it). Apparently I have a little too much to say about polo shirts. I surpise even myself. I'm afraid I'm going to be one of those people. You know, people who stand around at parties or soccer games and drone on and on and on and on and on... about model trains or low-carb diets or collecting pygmy elephants or whatever. It seems I'm like that with polo shirts. This is really weird, since as a general rule I detest polo shirts. This post is just the first, well second, of many many things I have to say about, yes, polo shirts.

Good grief.

I started out on the Polo Shirt quest with Kwik Sew 3226.


Unfortunately, I seem to be incapable of remembering that I usually really dislike KS patterns. They're sort of like frozen packages of diet chinese food: They seem like a good idea, but when I get them out of the package I'm always disappointed with the reality.

This KS pattern was like that. I chose it because I'd never made a polo shirt before and I had the suspicion that the placket would be tricky... too tricky to try to make one from BWOF or even Ottobre without picture instructions, even though I have several issues of both magazines with polo-like shirts. So I bought the Kwik Sew, because one thing I will say for them: they usually have excellent illustrations and instructions.

Unfortunately, they also seem to almost never make anything the way it's normally made. Case in point: this pattern doesn't do a 'typical' polo/rugby placket. It has this weird facing thingy that, when completed, forms a sort of floppy interior mess. I am of the opinion that needlessly excessive facings are pure evil. This one is a prime example.


Of course, I'd already cut out all the other pieces before I realized how awful the Floppy Facing would be. And of course, this shirt was part of my "let's see how many unwanted adult shirts we can use up for school uniforms" plan as well. Which is to say, I had a very limited quantity of fabric to work with (i.e. one 2XL-sized shirt's worth).

In the end, I found two useful rugby placket tutorials online: one here, apparently from Timmel Fabrics, although mysteriously you can't actually go to the Timmel Fabrics website. The other one is from Dawn at Two On Two Off. They both basically say the same thing, although Timmel's is more verbally descriptive and Dawn's has really good photos. Feeling more secure with a few pictures behind me, I scrapped the Floppy Facing and scrounged up enough remaining fabric to make a 'real' placket.


I can't say I did a very good job, but it was a place to start. The buttonholes are particularly disastrous, but I think that's mostly because I had the wrong needle in my machine and didn't realize until too late.

In any case, I plodded on. This first shirt was the result. I'll say right now that it's pretty dismal all things considered, but it was more of an experiment than an attempt at a perfected piece. I ended up changing the collar to a peter pan collar that I drafted myself, since I actually used an "old" (and, as far as I can tell, never worn) long-sleeved t-shirt I got from my mom. It didn't have a collar that I could cannibalize so I made this one instead.


No, those are not dust spots from my camera. The Big One has worn this shirt at least three times, which means it's basically destroyed from mysterious irrevocable spots. She is Very Messy.

I also gathered the cuffs of the sleeves with elastic, because the original pattern produced gargantuan sleeves... way too humongous for The Big One's little stick arms. The gathering had the added advantage of being more girlie.


I also thought I'd try out the decorative stitching on my sewing machine with a wing-needle, just to see what would happen. Nothing much, apparently. This was probably not the best fabric to try it on.


Since making this, my further efforts in the Polo Shirt quest have been better, especially since I completely changed my base pattern. All in all, I'm chalking this first one up to a learning experience. I learned:

A) how much fabric is provided for by a 2XL shirt (it will create an entire size 5 polo shirt or dress)

B) Kwik Sew patterns are just not for me. Maybe I'll remember that before I purchase another one. But probably not.

And C) despite owning approximately two thousand sewing reference books, not one -one- has any sort of instruction on how to sew a rugby/polo placket. And my multitude of sleeve placket instructions just don't quite cut it.



Clearly I have to purchase a few more books. It's for the children.