Yeah, so this one is long overdue for posting. This is the Grainline Archer Button Up Shirt which I made at a workshop with Lauren Taylor at Hello Stitch Studio which is the cutest and most welcoming studio you’ve ever been to. If I lived near them, they’d be like a second home.
Also, you can see my chickens above and my amazing chicken boots. They have chickens on them and I use them for taking care of my chickens. They are surprisingly comfortable actually.
The Archer is a classic button down shirt. It doesn’t have any bust darts. I’m wearing it closed in these photos, but in truth I like to wear it open over a tank top so it doesn’t really matter too much that it doesn’t have bust darts. If I were going to wear it closed, most of the time that might be different.
One of my favorite parts of the Archer is actually the back. I really like the yoke with the pleat. It makes it very comfortable to wear.
I’ve got a couple of progress shots from the workshop like the one above which was when I had finished the body but not yet attached the sleeves. I made a size 2 with slightly shortened arms on Lauren’s suggestion. I think the size 2 was right, but next time I’d keep the longer arms because I like them to hang over my hands a bit. That being said, I do tend to roll up my sleeves so I don’t really notice it too much.
I shrank my pockets down a fair bit — maybe 50%? — because otherwise they would have covered the entire chest area. I’m pretty pleased with the proportions of how they turned out. And no, I did not try to pattern match. It would have driven me nuts trying to so I just let it do its own thing.
The fabric was a Robert Kaufman cotton lawn that I got from Califabrics. Califabrics ships super fast so if you’re like me and you realize the week of the workshop that you don’t have any appropriate fabric, you can order very quickly. I really liked working with this fabric. You can see on the collar that it’s a little sheer, but that’s the under collar so I don’t mind. But it pressed and stitched up quite nicely and has been wearing well through the wash as well.
The workshop with Lauren was awesome and if you have a chance to take one with her, do it. She’s both a super cool person and a fantastic teacher. Above, she’s showing us how to mark evenly spaced buttonholes after positioning the first and most important bust button. She’s showing it on my top because I was moving pretty quickly during the workshop (I actually all but finished a second sleeveless version of the top which I also need to post) so I think I was the first to hit that point for demonstration purposes. This was one of many tips and tricks she showed us. I always walk away from her workshops with new skills under my belt.
I’ve also taken a jeans workshop from Lauren (I’m actually wearing those jeans in the pic above because I couldn’t resist the photo op) and I would take this workshop or the jeans one again just because her workshops and the people who are drawn to them are so fun. I’ve actually kept in touch (albeit recently mostly on social media given the pandemic) with several people from both of her workshops. I was super sad when the workshop I signed up for last summer got cancelled, but fingers crossed the one at the end of this year works out to be safe!
So there you have it, my Archer Button Up (and also some gratuitous chicken photos).
Oh! big disappointment: those are pears! And I thought, from a distance, they were chicken wahkles, which would have been much more attractive and interesting.