Astrid's Dagger Collar Shirt

I've always been fond of "retro" and mid-century aesthetics, and despite the gradual pace at which I've been piecing things together for Astrid, I've had those kind of 1960s and 1970s styles in mind for how I wanted to style her right from the get-go. (A lot of the inspiration for Myrtle's look comes from the same era.) A while ago I found some great fabric at my local yarn and quilt store and thought it would be perfect to make one of those button-down shirts from the '70s with the big collars at a doll scale. The magic of the internet has helpfully informed me that this is called a "dagger collar" - hence the title of this post.

I'm still not the most confident drafting patterns from scratch in this scale, so I decided to start with the JID Girl Shirt Pattern from Antique Lilac as a base. There's a very detailed and helpful tutorial for how to put the shirt together (which I referenced frequently!) at the link, so I'm mostly just going to talk about the modifications I made.

There were a few things I knew I wanted before I got started: Most obviously, I wanted to make a shirt with a big pointy collar. The original pattern is for a comfortably loose-fitting button-down shirt, like many in my actual real-life wardrobe, but I wanted a more fitted "dress shirt" kind of look for Astrid. I also wanted the shirt to have bishop sleeves, which seem to be pretty common in the styles I took inspiration from. With that in mind, I got started making my alterations.

I made a mockup out of my trusty old bedsheet first, so I could test the fit and make changes before cutting into any of my good fabric. I didn't think to take many photos of this process, so I don't have much in the way of visuals, I'm afraid. I don't think I thought it would be very interesting. I can tell you that most of what I did was adding front, side, and bust darts to the body of the shirt to make it fit closer to the body, as well as taking in the side seams so that they tapered in at the waist. I also drew up a new sleeve pattern that was wider near the cuff, and extended the ends of the collar.

This is about the only picture of the mock-up process I have. It's not very good.

I made a few minor adjustments to help with the fit elsewhere, as well. JIDs are fairly close in size to Astrid's Gem of Doll body, but they have a more naturalistic body shape compared to her exaggerated hourglass figure. I ended up taking some length off of the neckband and sleeve cuffs to account for her slimmer neck and wrist. 

This is what my altered pattern looked like: 

You can see that the neckband and sleeve cuff patterns are basically unchanged, aside from a little bit trimmed off of the ends.

But of course I had to make another last-minute change as I was cutting out my good fabric. The original Antique Lilac pattern is constructed with front and yoke facings, but I decided I wanted a decorative button band similar to the ones on many full-size button-down shirts I own. So I lopped off the facing on the front pattern pieces and added some additional seam allowance.

The button band itself was actually pretty easy to do, despite my not having planned for it whatsoever. After sewing all the darts, I determined which side of the shirt would overlap the other - on a real shirt, this would be the side that you add your buttonholes to. Then, I marked the center front, folded the fabric along that line with the right sides together, and pressed.

The next step is a bit hard to see since the fabric's so busy. About a quarter of an inch from the first fold, I folded the fabric back over so the right side faced out and pinned it in place.

Folded the raw edge to the wrong side and pressed that:

Then I folded it over again and pinned through the whole thing to create a nice clean edge. After that, I used my dress form to make sure it would still close properly in front. I was a little worried I'd somehow manage to make it way too small.

I was satisfied with the fit, so I top stitched the button band down once near the inner edge and once near the outer edge, which is also of course the one step in the process I failed to photograph.

The other side was much simpler. Since I didn't need to worry about the decorative details, I trimmed off the excess fabric and essentially just made a rolled hem along the front. 

Construction past that was pretty standard. I sewed the shoulder seams together, started working on the collar, and then immediately moved on to working on the sleeves so I could avoid working on the collar. 

The truth is that I ended up putting together three different versions of the collar, because I was being picky about how sharp my corners were. The points of the collars on my mock-up had been nice and crisp, so I stubbornly kept trying to achieve the same thing until I accepted that I was going to have to suck it up and live with slightly imperfect collar points, the horror.

I think the issue largely had to do with the fabric I was using, which was a bit bulkier, not as finely-woven, and frayed more easily. (This stuff frayed way more easily than I expected.) I tend to use a lot of quilting cotton when sewing for dolls, because it often comes in small scale patterns and my local quilt shop's excellent deals on fat quarters are hard to resist, but it's not always the best option. After all, it's designed to be used for, well... quilts, not apparel. Even tiny apparel. Maybe especially tiny apparel.

Anyway. Like I said, I took a break from my collar troubles to work on the sleeves. The method I used to put mine together was basically the same as the second option described in the Antique Lilac tutorial. Other than the shape of the sleeve itself, the biggest difference is that I chose to finish the sides of my sleeves with Fray Check and a zigzag stitch before hemming them rather than doing a rolled hem. 

I wanted the open seam above the cuff to have a neat edge, but I don't ever intend to roll the sleeves of this shirt up, so I figured it would be good enough. I gathered the bottom edge of the sleeve to fit the width of the cuff and sewed them together, finished the edge, pressed, etc.

To reduce the amount of bulk at the cuff, I finished the opposite edge the same way I'd finished the edges of the sleeves. Once the sides of the cuff had been sewn together and turned right side out, I used a whip stitch to sew the inside edge of the cuff to the seam allowance.

If you want to make reading this post more exciting, you can go back and drink every time I say "cuff" in that last bit.

The sleeves were ready to be attached, which meant I could no longer avoid facing another round of collar troubles. Actually, this time they stem from the lack of a facing, haha, get it.

Because the original pattern has front and yoke facings, the neckband is sandwiched between the facing and the main fabric and sewn in that way. This is the smart way to do this. It's much quicker, easier, and neater, especially on a small scale like this. But when I modified the pattern to add the decorative button band, I forwent the facings altogether, so I couldn't do that. 

To keep potentially-visible parts of the shirt as neat as possible, I opted to attach the neckband the same way you would if you were making a human-sized collared shirt. In theory, this is fairly easy, or at least fairly simple: you sew the outside of the neckband to the neck opening, press the seam allowance inside, then fold the raw edge of the inside of the neckband in and handsew it into place before topstitching around the edges. I've done it before.

In practice... well, I was working at roughly a quarter of the size I would be if I was making a shirt for an adult human, so things quickly got fiddly. I'd been having a bit of trouble with my sewing machine during this project - initially I assumed there was something about the fabric that it wasn't playing nice with, but I actually think it was the thread I was using, because things went much more smoothly after I ran out and had to replace it. And remember when I said this fabric frayed way more easily than I expected it to? I hadn't used Fray Check on the edges of all my fabric, because I didn't think I would need it, so the very narrow neckband piece quickly started to deteriorate. (I actually had to take a break around this point because I completely ran out of Fray Check and had to get a new bottle before I kept going, lest my tiny fabric pieces fray to nothingness) 

After a couple of attempts to sew it on using the machine, which did not go well, I was getting worried that if I handled it any more it was going to completely come apart. So I took a seam ripper to the neckband, trimmed the worst of the frayed threads away from the neck opening, and started over.

I cut out new pieces for the neckband, which I treated with Fray Check before I started sewing them on. I also gave up on using the machine, and just sewed the neckband to the neck opening by hand. 

With a little more effort I got the inside seam allowance folded up and pinned in place as well.

I sewed that closed using a ladder stitch. Luckily my machine was willing to cooperate with me long enough to topstitch around the edges, and then my collar troubles were genuinely over.

In the interest of honesty and transparency, I will admit that it took me a few attempts to attach the sleeves. Once they were attached, I was able to sew up the side seams and try it on Astrid.

Hey, that's starting to look like a shirt!

I did make a few more adjustments to the darts close to the end of this project to try to improve the fit. Even after that, it wasn't perfect - it's a bit baggy around the waist, and there are some funny things going on in the back.

You can see in the picture above that the fabric bunches awkwardly in the back, and the back of the yoke rides up a bit around the shoulders. I think it would help to make the neck opening a bit deeper, and the back evidently needs to be taken in quite a bit.

The pattern could clearly use some more revisions and refinement. I was happy enough with how the shirt looked that I didn't bother to mess with it any more, but I already have half-baked plans for more shirts in this style, so I'll probably keep working on the pattern and improving it as I go.

After that all I had left were some final details. I had tried to use the machine to do some topstitching on the cuffs, but it really hadn't worked out well, so I did that by hand.

And you can barely see it in the end. Ah, my love of unnecessary details knows no bounds.

I did do the bottom hem on my machine. Last came the front closures. I'd wanted to pick up one of the colours from the stripes for the buttons, but none of the tiny buttons I had were a perfect match. I chose some teal ones I had stashed away that I thought complemented the blue and green in the fabric nicely. The buttons are just decorative - the actual closures are metal snaps hidden underneath. 

The final product:

Ta da!

And some extra glamour shots for the road:

Man, does Astrid ever look washed out in these photos. I really need to get her faceup done. Now that it's summer and the weather's getting better, that's actually starting to look like a viable prospect. But then at the same time I have so many other projects and ideas I want to work on too...

I'm really happy with the final product here. There's definitely room for improvement, and I probably will continue to tweak and make adjustments to the pattern, but even if the fit isn't quite right I still ended up with a very cute shirt in the style and silhouette I wanted. I can already think of a few really fun outfits I can put together with it...

Thank you for reading my rambling thoughts all the way to the end! I always hope these posts are helpful or at least entertaining in some way beyond just serving as a sort of virtual project journal. I have (as always) a lot of projects planned or on the go, so hopefully I'll have something new to post less than, uh... two months from now.