Have you ever had a shirt so ephemeral and delicate that you were a little bit terrified to actually wear it?

Fear of messing with its pristine white silk goodness may result in this Fibre Mood Carry shirt not really leaving my wardrobe very often but I still feel rather proud just knowing that it’s there!

So let me take you on the journey of my Fibre Mood Carry.

I received an advanced copy of this pattern from Fibre Mood for free in exchange for posting about it during the launch week of its edition of the magazine. But I am also a paid-up Fibre Mood subscriber so I paid for it myself anyway!

The Fibre Mood Carry is an oversized shirt, with a proper yoke, dropped shoulders and the choice of a statement pleated sleeved or a more “regular” sleeve option.

I really enjoyed sewing up the Fibre Mood Carry shirt and feel that its cut really hits the oversized shirt nail right on its head. It’s definitely got BIG big sleeve vibe and gives me a slight pirate chic vibe, but as long as you’re up for a statement sleeve, this shirt is a great one!

And while I did find this project a tad challenging overall, that was all down to my choice to sew the Fibre Mood Carry in delicate silk!

My Fibre Mood Carry Shirt

Based on my body measurements, I should have made a size L for the Fibre Mood Carry Shirt.

After checking out the finished garment measurements, I decided it was safe to size down to an M. So this shirt is an M on a ” should be L” body. For my personal preferences, I like it as it is and I wouldn’t want it to be any more oversized!

I have sewn the Fibre Mood Carry as designed, except for one very minor hack. Instead of putting a pleat in the centre back, I gathered the back when attaching it to the yoke.

This was purely a design choice.

Am I the only one who obsesses over garments when watching television?

In the final episode of season 2 of Alice in Borderland, at the end, the female protagonist is wearing a gorgeous white shirt with gathers across the back and I have been wanting to replicate this ever since. So as soon as I saw the Fibre Mood Carry, with all its lovely volume, I knew I wanted to make this small change to try to replicate that gathered back.

I didn’t experience any issues with using the pattern or the instructions and everything came together easily as far as they were concerned.

The instructions contained a new-to-me method for attaching the shoulder of a yoked shirt so that all the insides are tucked away. As someone whose brain hurts and heart starts beating faster every time I know I need to use the burrito method, I found the technique included in these pattern instructions – which basically involved manually twisting the fabric around in an awkward manner – simpler than burrito-ing it.

I also enjoyed the way the sleeve placket was created. In other shirt patterns, I had always found it easier when the sleeve placket is one single piece, rather than two pieces. However this was the first time I have sewn a sleeve placket with two pattern pieces, without getting hopelessly confused, so I was pleasantly surprised.

White silk shirt dreams

So I can’t deny I have a weak spot for white shirts.

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But surely, we do all need to have the perfect white shirt that works for each occasion – cropped, oversized, tucked in etc.

And my white shirt army was lacking one vital member that I had been fantasising about for years.

A breezy smooth lightweight silk white shirt.

Surely a silk white shirt must be a close contender for the crown of the ultimate white shirt.

And despite wanting a white silk shirt for years, I’d been too scared of the prospect of sewing it!

As I had anticipated, this self-striped silk (you can’t really see it in these photos but it has a subtle stripe to it), which I bought from The Fabric Store in person, was quite delicate and really at the very limit of being suitable for this kind of detail-oriented sewing.

Does anyone else ever feel as though they only ever find silk that is too light or too heavy? I rarely manage to find the silk sweet spot!

My silk didn’t take particularly well to being interfaced and tended to bubble and react badly to the iron. Speaking of which, have you ever spent an entire sewing project rather terrified that your temperamental spitty iron would vomit a dragon’s breath of sticky brown gunk all over your project at any minute? I spent the entire project obsessively using a press cloth to try to protect my lovely white silk from any unexpected iron attack!

This silk also frayed quite a lot, did not appreciate being pinned. Which wasn’t ideal when the fabric also slipped around like a couple of seals racing down a slide.

And sewing the buttonholes was rather nerve-racking.

And, in the vein of the temperamental iron, I also needed to desperately protect this Fibre Mood Carry shirt from another sewing enemy – the dodgy pin!

I have this one pin in my pin cushion, which is blunt and horrible. And yet, for some reason, for months on end, whenever I push it into a fabric and notice “oh it’s the bad pin”, I just took it out of the fabric and jammed it right back into the pin cushion.

Instead of, you know, simply removing it from circulation and placing it in the rubbish bin that is within arms reach of my sewing machine.

Well, I very much regretted that prior decision-making during this project. I knew the bad pin was green so I instead found myself avoiding all green pins in my pin cushion in order to make sure that I didn’t inadvertently try to push that terrible pin into this delicate silk!

So I promise that next time I stumble across that dodgy green pin, I will send it on to the pin afterlife

So, I am not going to lie. I found it a bit challenging to sew up this Fibre Mood Carry shirt, simply due to the challenges of working with delicate silk, but I got there in the end.

And I love the end result.

It is meeting all my breezy dreams.

The pleats and gathers on the sleeve look totally dreamy in silk and it was all worth it, as far as I’m concerned.

But, as I mentioned in the opening, I will be very careful in deciding when to wear this Fibre Mood Carry in silk.

Just to give you an indication of my current levels of protectiveness towards this shirt, when I proudly bought my finished garment downstairs to my husband to show him my lovely new silk shirt, he reached out to touch it.

At which point I snatched it back towards me and snapped it him “DON’T TOUCH”. I was afraid his dry hands could scratch it!

So this shirt may not be practical or durable or wearable in all situations. But it is lovely enough that I’m confident I will find a space for it!

So no regrets that this lovely white silk Fibre Mood Carry has joined my white shirt gang!