Coral TAL Oversized Shirt Dress
Pattern
Fabric
Coral Cotton, from SR Harris at some point I'm pretty sure. There is some discoloration/staining throughout the cut so I had to work around that.
Notions
Imitation Pearl buttons in 18L (Button Band) and 16L (Cuffs, Collar), from Wawak
Finishing Notes
Tower plackets instead of the fold-under plackets the pattern calls for.
Hidden button band because I only had white buttons on hand and didn't want them to stick out so much.
Hemmed with bias binding — one of my preferred ways to finish a slightly curved hem like this.
Lengthened somewhat from the pattern to make it an actual dress, but I made this one shorter than my floral dress.
Next Time
Pockets are set based on pattern marks and are a little bit low for me. I'll raise them up a couple inches next time.
Fitting
After making a couple versions of this (floral dress, white shirt) without a narrow shoulder adjustment (and knowing I needed it), I finally took 10 minutes and did the adjustment work. So much better! The shoulder is still slightly long, but now it looks like a very reasonable fit for an oversized-but-well-proportioned shirt, and not like a shirt that is just too big.
Since I made quite a big narrow shoulder adjustment (1") I also added 1" of height to the sleeve cap so the sleeve would still fit. Some narrow shoulder adjustment tutorials don't detail or recommend adding height to the cap as with a small adjustment, the cap may still fit with no alterations. After narrowing the shoulder and adding the height to the cap, I measured the seam allowances to check that they'd fit together.
Linking to some narrow shoulder adjustment and sleeve cap resources below:
This slash/spread/overlap works well for making somewhat small narrow shoulder adjustments. The larger the adjustment needed, the lower the longer diagonal line should be drawn in to the armscye.
This is a pretty high level overview, but the diagram showing the horizontally cut and spread/overlapped sleeve cap is exactly what I did.
This tutorial goes a bit further than I did and details how to add excess height to a sleeve cap to make a puffy gathered sleeve cap