Finally - Pastille Finish!

I finally buckled down and finished my Pastille shirt!  I wore it last week and I love the fit.  It is very comfortable with a lot of shaping.  If anything, I made it a little too loose at the hem.  Personally, I don't prefer a lot of fitting ease, but still I was a little worried that my muslin was too tight somewhere.  It was really wrinkly and somewhat funny, but I couldn't find a single specific thing to change to make it better, so I just trusted that it was due to the lightweight fabric and forged ahead.

It's been a little while, so this is what the muslin looked like:

And here is how the shirt turned out:

Excuse my sleepy look - I have been waiting three weeks for a good time to photograph my Pastille, so when DH agreed to help me this morning, I hopped out of bed to get started without even stopping for breakfast.

It seems that moving on from my muslining was the right call.  I actually had to tighten my final version a bit, but I just increased the center back seam allowance by 1/4" and it was all good.  Well, all good except those wrinkles under the bust.  I know they showed up on my muslin, but really they are there on the final shirt for a different reason.  I mis-figured how to lay the darts into the waist seam and ended up sewing them in at the wrong angle.  I took the front waist seam apart and re-did it, but I had cut the fabric of the darts too short.  Even letting them out as much as possible, the front waist is being pulled up by the short fabric of the darts, leaving the excess fabric wrinkled across the front.

Oh, and the sleeves.  After I had finished putting the sleeve facings in, I put the shirt on and realized that there was far too much fabric there (think linebacker look).   I took them apart and mostly fixed them, but for future versions I will draft "real" sleeves in place of these cap sleeves.  

Overall this shirt turned out to be more of a wearable muslin.  The construction details are hidden by the dark fabric, so the only really visible feature is the neckline.  Besides that, when I fixed the waist seam/dart issue I caused a new problem.  There may or may not have been some seam ripping that was fueled by the power of rage.  My stitches were really hard to see and in the end I made a hole in my (extremely fray-prone) fabric, right where the waist seam should have been.  I moved the seam up a bit, but I'm not confident that this shirt will last very well.

I used an invisible zip (because the color matched better) but put it in like a regular zipper

I think I did an ok job on the back zip, it is basically about how my zippers usually turn out.  I can see some flaws but I am not going to try to fix it because it's bound to come out the same second time around anyway.  Overall, this shirt is not a total win, but my fabric was only $6 total so it isn't a big loss either.  (Hooray for Fabrics-R-Us!)   I have another linen fabric in maroon to be turned into this shirt as well.  Any ideas for embellishing it?