This week, it’s the Olya Shirt by Paper Theory – in both its shirt and dress variations.

Both of which involve stripes!

Just in case anyone is interested in playing the collective noun game with me, what do you think should be the collective noun for “stripe play”.

A circus of stripe play?

A cacaphony of stripe play?

A salad of stripe play? (trying for aliteration there…)

Or, perhaps, like colour, it could simply be a riot of stripe play?

Well, whatever it is, my versions of the Olya Shirt and Olya Shirt Dress have plenty of it!

Shirted up

I have something of a mixed relationship with button-down shirts.

I have a lot of them. 13 to be precise, according to the Stylebook App. And I really like them as a garment.

I also love sewing them.

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They are probably my favourite type of project when I want something involved.

But I don’t reach for mine all that often and I don’t really know why.

The only ones I find myself wearing with any frequency are oversized flannel ones during the winter.

So why is it that I don’t reach for a garment that I think I really like?

(Granted stay-at-home-dressing has had an impact here on shirt wearing frequency too, but it was definitely a problem area for me even before I got stuck at home!)

Does anyone else out there have this problem or am I the only one who loves shirts but doesn’t really wear them?

Part of me thinks that they make me look a bit “old” and “lawyer-y”. Not that those are bad things. But I like to dress in clothes which feel kind of vibrant and buttoned shirts don’t often give me that feeling.

I think it’s also in part (actually, mostly) because I do not find them sufficiently comfortable for a full day of wear.

Recent weight fluctuations are partly to blame here.

As is fabric choice. I often choose cotton/linen etc. when sewing shirts. However, what I really want to wear on my top half are drapey, soft, cooling and, most of all, more fluid fabrics – silk, viscose, tencel etc and I really don’t have enough shirts in these kind of fabrics.

The primary problem area is that I almost always find it uncomfortably restrictive to wear a shirt for a whole day around the arms, particularly the upper arms.

Part of this is that it has taken me rather longer than it should have to realise that I almost always need a full bicep adjustment (although, having said that, I don’t need one in the Olya Shirt, which is sufficiently roomy, yeah!).

So, enter…

My Pink Striped Olya Shirt

Which is why I’m hoping this pink version might help me get out of my buttoned shirt rut.

Speaking of cooling drapey goodness, this two-toned striped tencel twill is from Meter Meter.

I really took my time to think about pattern placement and which directions I wanted every single pattern piece to go. Even my sleeve placket is cutely contrasting, but you’ll have to take my word for it because I totally forgot to photograph it for you.

Honestly, there is nothing better than contrasting stripes to look very intentional while, at the same time, saving you from having to stripe match!

Yep, I do love me some stripe play.

So, all-in-all, I’m hoping that this shirt is going to hit that sweet spot and actually be a shirt that I find myself reaching for, secure in the knowledge that, with this lovely fluid fabric, it will be wearable all day without eventually feeling like sand paper wrapped around my elbows.

Indeed, the fact that the Olya Shirt is extra roomy around the arms is one of the things that most attracts me to it. I have sewn quite a few Kalle shirts in my time, but the arm is really not big enough and I am a bit intimidated to try and adjust the arm on a shirt with a yoke and dropped shoulder.

Just not sure where to start with that project!

In the meantime, the Olya Shirt is here for me!

Olya Shirt Dress

This is my second time sewing the Olya Shirt pattern. I have already sewn it up as the the Olya Shirt Dress in striped linen.

Stripes, again!

Yep, the lines on the Olya pattern are just made for stripes!

I don’t really wear that Olya Shirt Dress as much as it deserves, through no fault of its own.

As an Australian, I find the Northern European summer usually on the chilly side (although climate change seems to be addressing this somewhat!). When I made this Olya Shirt Dress, I had thought that perhaps summer clothing but with longer sleeves was the solution. But, I’ve found it that that isn’t really working for me, at least in dress form.

I’m not going to wear tights with a linen dress because that just breaks my heart.So, if it’s warm enough to have bare legs, it is generally going to be warm enough for bare arms too. And if it’s that warm, I’m always going to choose one of my many bare armed garments to get a vitamin D hit.

So, I’ve found I’ve been wearing this Olya Shirt Dress more as a lightweight coat than as a dress because of my climate issues!

So I’ve also tried to rectify this problem by returning to the Olya Shirt Dress pattern too, but we’ll get to that one.

Sewing the Olya Shirt

So, let’s start with the new Olya Shirt then, shall we?

This is a size 12, with no modifications. It’s the same size as my Olya Shirt Dress, which I knew still fit me well. There is nothing like taking the fitting anxiety off the table by having a previous version to try on!

The Olya Shirt is a really enjoyable and engaging sewing project. It’s not difficult but it’s not easy either. Perhaps I wouldn’t suggest it for your very first shirt, but after you’ve made a couple, it’s definitely accessible.

The only thing that I would change is that the interfacing I used on my placket on this one turned out to be a bit too heavy, which makes the shirt a tad awkward when I half-tuck. You can see in the above photo it wants to bulge forward.

The instructions in the Olya Shirt pattern are easy to follow and there is also an Olya Shirt sewalong which I found really useful.

Soft start vs hard start

Speaking of instructions, what is your preference when it comes to the order of sewing things?

My 5 year old son swears that it’s best to eat the bad things (i.e. vegetables) first, getting them over and done with, before moving on to the part of the meal he actually likes.

The Olya Shirt instructions order would go down well with him.

They start with sewing the sleeve placket, which is a pretty detailed and tricky step.

At first I was down with this approach.

I was thinking “this is great, I get to do the tricky part while I’m all motivated and fresh! What a fabulous idea that doesn’t infantilise the sewist!”.

I thought it was brilliant.

But then, I kind of messed it up!!

Despite clipping as close to the corner of my sleeve placket as I possibly could without cutting it, I just couldn’t get my flipped-around placket to sit totally flat. So then I went from “I’m going to pay attention and slow down and sew the best shirt ever” mindset to “f@!k it, I’ve messed it up anyway”.

And that mindset change happened at the first very step!!! If we’d worked our way up to the placket, perhaps I would have been able to maintain my optimistic spirit a little longer!

So, for me, the verdict is still out as to whether I’m best off starting with the challenges or working my way up to them!

In reality, I guess I’m probably just best off not messing steps up, but who has that kind of control?

How do you like to sew?

Hit the hard stuff first or ease your way in?

Olya Shirt Breast Pockets

This Olya Shirt was the first time I have ever sewn the very distinctive breast pockets on the Olya Shirt, because I replaced them with visible patch pockets the first time I sewed this pattern.

I found sewing these Olya Shirt pockets a bit challenging, for sure. One of my pockets ends up sitting flatter and better than the other, but it’s the kind of thing that’s really only noticeable to me.

And, well, maybe you guys now that I’ve told you all about it.

Nonetheless, just to be clear, these things I’m complaining about are really the height of nit-picking. This is probably, overall, one of the best constructed garments I have sewn so I am genuinely proud of both the way it is made and the overall look of my Olya Shirt.

I liked it so much, in fact, that I, ummm, made another…

Kalle shirt dress meets Olya shirt dress

You know how I said I have 13 buttoned shirts in my wardrobe? Just to be clear, that is entirely separate of shirt dresses, of which, I own, ummm, 10!

Yikes! Sometimes the raw numbers of tracking your wardrobe can be a bit scary.

Well, what the hell, better make that 11.

I bought this gorgeous classic shirting from Meter Meter. It is soft and lightweight and I like the way that it has a classic men’s shirt vibe.

I couldn’t find it on their website now, so perhaps it is sold out. It was a designer deadstock, so I think the stock was fairly limited.

After sewing the pink Olya shirt and enjoying the experience so much, I decided to use the Olya pattern again, this time in Shirt Dress form.

But, there were a few variations that I wanted to make to give it a real oversized-men’s-shirt vibe.

Enter the Kalle Shirt by Closet Core Pattern. Nothing like mashing up two great patterns!

Here, my starting points for both the Olya Shirt and the Kalle Shirt were the size 12, which was what I had cut already.

So I traced the bottom of this dress hack from the Kalle Shirt Dress pattern, including that famous curvy hemline I just adore sooooo much.

I also made this one slightly more A-line than the Kalle Shirt, making the bottom of this Olya Shirt Dress about an inch wider at the bottom than the original Kalle Shirt dress.

I also took the hidden placket piece from the Kalle Shirt (after checking that both shirts had plackets of the same finished width – they did!), trimming at the edges to bring the seam allowance down from the 5/8ths used in the Kalle Shirt pattern to the 1cm used in the Olya Shirt.

The rest of the pattern is all the Olya Shirt.

I just find those pockets and the yoke irresistible.

I still didn’t get the pockets perfect, but this time, I think even you guys won’t notice the imperfection.

This time around, I did really struggle with the square corner at the back yoke.

I’ve done this quite a bit now, between the Olya Shirt and my Kabuki tee, but this day, it just didn’t want to happen! I’ve actually talked before about how much I love sewing right angles – that it feels like sewing magic!

Well the magic abandoned me on this Olya Shirt Dress!

The thing is, when sewing a right angle, you only have one good shot at doing it properly.

Here, I messed that shot up and it ended up all puckered at my corners. I had to unpick the right angle I’d sewn but, by that stage, you’ve already clipped into the seam allowance in order to enable you to turn the corner.

So when you are trying to resew it, the corner of the seam allowance has already been clipped to within a millimetre so it’s really hard to position everything right.

In the end, it’s not perfect, but I still love it!

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I’ve also shortened the sleeve of the Olya Shirt and added a little cuff, cut-on-the-bias. Because diagonal lines are pretty.

So, my love for Paper Theory continues unabated – as three goes round at the Olya Shirt attests!

Update April 2021 – Linen Olya Shirts

I’ve made several more Olya shirts which are identical to the pink striped one, just in classic linen. There’s nothing new so it doesn’t justify a blog post, but thought I’d do a photo dump in case it’s useful to see the Olya Shirt in a different fabric.

Voila!

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Oh and, finally, a little P.S! If you like to get your blog hits through Bloglovin’, feel free to follow me over there: you can find me here. And you can find me on Instagram here.