127. Style 1001

After feeling overwhelmed by too many possibilities, I decided to let the 16 shirts guide me. I laid them all out on the floor and spent a few moments pondering the graphics and messages on each shirt, and saw some groupings emerge:

This set was first. The black shirt had a little motif on the front:

And on the back, it reads, "There's a fire in me/ A passion so hot/ That if you tapped it/ You'd get burned":

Then some decisions became clear about putting these shirts together, into a new garment:

• The graphic on the back of the black shirt is very, very literal. I preferred the subtlety and size of the coordinating print on the front chest pocket area of the shirt.
• The yellow was too, too much. I wanted to ground the color. Seemed to make sense combined with the fire/ hot theme of the black shirt.
• With the intensity of the yellow, I wanted to keep the shirt sleeveless or short-sleeved to minimize the punch of color.
• In order to keep this "local", I thought about the challenge many Austinites have in wanting to dress in layers when it gets above 90 degrees for at least 6 months of the year. I went back through my sketchpad to find a sketch of a garment idea that could give the illusion of layering without someone actually putting on two shirts.

A contrast yoke, using the black shirt's smaller motif was the solution. I cut out a muslin from one of the scrap shirts from my husband, measured and cut carefully, and used that as the pattern piece for cutting the motif from the black shirt:

Except that, when I laid the pattern piece on top of the black t-shirt, I found that the black shirt didn't have enough fabric to cut out the yoke as it was. I turned the motif upside down and had more fabric to work with, but it didn't look right. So I cut the top of the yoke piece straight.

Now onto the yellow shirt. I used the back of the largest one, a size 2XL, so that I would have the most available fabric for gathering around the yoke. And it still wasn't quite as much as I wanted! But I like how it turned out:

In this photo you are just looking at the front of the shirt -- no back is attached yet. There's a bit more shimmying and negotiating of the fabric to be done. But I think this is the last you'll see of the top before it is complete. :)

Back I go into the workroom......