Buffalo Check Melilot

 Hi Friends,

I’ve had this shirt done for a little bit now, but my pictures didn’t come out as amazing as I wanted them to so I kept hoping I was going to be able to get new ones, but I’ve had a lot of things to photograph (more posts to come soon!!) and quite frankly I’m tired of holding off on sharing this shirt with you all.  Sooooo… how about if I get better pictures in the future, I’ll just  share those too :).

I had the opportunity to sew up this amazing Meet MILK Two Tone Check Tencel Twill Fabric and boy did I love it!  I knew right away from the description that the fabric was going to be a winner because it was 100% tencel, but of course I also loved the buffalo check print.  When it arrived the checks were smaller than I was expecting, but not in a bad way, just in a surprising way and the fabric quality was as excellent has I had expected it to be.  With a medium weight, it was almost like a substantial shirting but soft and drapey at the same time.

When I first ordered this fabric I knew I was going to take it one of two directions, but both directions were going to lead to a button up shirt.   The question was whether I was going to go oversized and grungy, or slim and elegant.  I feel like I ended up somewhere in the middle, … lumberjack chic?

The pattern I used was the Deer and Doe Melilot.  It is a pattern that I have sewn up before, but only once and it was the short sleeve version.  I loooove, how the sleeves came out, but I might be tempted to add 1” to the length of them next time, just to give them a little more give when moving around with the cuffs buttoned up.

In my main pictures you can see I’m wearing it all buttoned up, but in my sitting pictures you can see I’m wearing it open over a long sleeve tee.  I love how versatile it is because of this, and that’s one of the reasons I feel like its in between grungy/lumberjack and sleek and sophisticated.  It’s all in how you decide to wear it.

One of the reasons I was so unhappy with the pictures I took is that there are so many wrinkles. Grr, and I want to explain a little how that came to be.  My husband and I decided to take a trip up north about an hours distance away to a cute town for some lunch and meandering, and the plan was to find somewhere to take pictures once we got up there.  I had obviously worn this outfit under my coat in the car sitting for that whole hour and hence all the wrinkles.  For sure this fabric is going to wrinkle because its a natural fibre, but honestly it doesn’t wrinkle that easily because its a bit substantial.  In fact when I took the seated pictures on a different day, it had been hanging in my closet for a couple days, and the wrinkles had already fallen out by then.  So anyways, life is full of wrinkles, but sitting in a heated car for an hour, with your outfit smooshed under a zipped up coat doesn’t help.  Lol.

Ok, getting back to the shirt itself.  The construction was fairly straightforward for a button up, and honestly matching up the plaid wasn’t too difficult.  Because the plaid was so small I didn’t worry about lining it up both ways, just horizontally, and I think it came out pretty good if I do say so myself.  As always when I could cut pieces on the bias to save me to the trouble of getting really detailed, I did… like in the plackets.  Aaaaand on the topic of plackets, I loved the construction of these guys.  When I was in school the first plackets we learned where basically like applying bias binding to the slit, but I find these ‘house’ style plackets to be much easier and less fiddly.  

 

Anyways, this is my newest shirt in the rotation and I love it.  Have you made the melilot before?  Do you also love the plackets?

Kten