Copying a Favorite Cowl-Neck Shirt
Finished December 18, 2002
This drapy shirt is one of my favorites. I bought it a year or two ago at Target and finally decided to copy it in other fabrics.
It is a cowl-neck pullover with no darts and 3/4 sleeves.
Front view:
It's difficult to make out the style lines with the matte black fabric. Here's a close-up of the cowl neck.
I used PatternMaster Boutique (of course) to draft the pattern. I used a casual dartless blouse with no ease and tried the "mock cowl" option for the collar. I used some cotton jersey that was in my stash and put together a trial. Here is the result.
The fit was right but the collar just didn't want to sit properly. Here's a close up of the collar.
It didn't "drape" the way the original does. I figured there were two issues at play: first, the fabric I used was simply too heavy to drape right. Second, the shape of the collar was wrong. So I took the original shirt and compared it to the pattern piece. And I realized that the collar piece shouldn't be a simple rectangle: it needed to be a trapezoid. So I redrafted the collar piece and got some lighter weight knit at G Street and made the final shirt.
This was much, much better!! Here is the neckline -- just about identical to the original.
Both the trial and the final were assembled with the serger, using a narrow 3-thread overlock for the seams and a narrow cover stitch for the hems. The final version has side slits, just like the original does.
I will be making more of this pattern; it's very comfortable. I have some stretchy boucle knit in my stash that would lend itself nicely to this design.
Update
Several people have asked how exactly I modified the collar piece to drape so nicely. So here is how I did it:
Hopefully this will make sense. Remember, I started with a rectangular collar pattern as drafted by the Mock Cowl option.