Various random notes

This post will be a bit of a mish-mash. First, we'll start off with a photo of my sewing table:
Not too messy, but not that great either. Sorry the photo is a little blurry. The camera batteries were dying, so I couldn't take another photo. (You'll notice that dead camera batteries will be a nearly omni-present theme in posts with photos. My camera uses batteries extremely quickly and the rechargeable batteries we have are nearing the end of their lives and hold very little charge anyway. Sorry about that.)

Now, on to today's finished object, a pair of pajamas for B's doll Manny, made to match his. These pajamas were a mess and a half. The rise wound up far too small and the waist far too big, so I did some last-minute changes in the form of an added waistband, a good two inches taken out of the back seam, and some shirring to make everything a bit tighter. It looks pretty silly up close, but the shirt covers it up. And anyway, people, this is a pair of pajamas. For a doll. Let's keep this in perspective.

The other thing I worked on today was the shirt I "finished" yesterday, New Look 6807. I mentioned already how I'm not happy with the neckline. Although I raised it at least an inch, it's still awfully low for my comfort. I was originally going to rip out the neck band and add more gathers to the front to make the neckline smaller, but I decided to add a pleat to the center front instead. This kind of negates the gathers, but it saves a tremendous amount of time. It doesn't look that bad, either:
(As a matter of fact, the photo actually makes the pleat look a lot more bumpy and weird than it does in real life.)

So far, so good, right? Only sort of. I also mentioned there were some weird wrinkles in the back. I had cherished hopes that this was just an odd symptoms of the neck bagginess and that pleating the neckline would do away with this problem. No such luck--they got much worse, and now the back of the shirt is extremely wrinkly and bizarre looking. It's hard to describe, so I'll just put up a photo:
Is that not weird looking? I've never seen anything like it, even in RTW clothes, which almost never fit properly. My original thought was that the shirt needed a swayback adjustment, but now I'm not so sure. There seem to be an awful lot of wrinkles for that. The back of the shirt also gaps out a bit at the neck.

What I can't decide is how this shirt would actually wear. My dressmaker's dummy is covered with some sort of cloth which makes her anything but slippery, so fabric often hangs differently on her than it does on me. Her shoulders are also a little wider than mine. Perhaps the thing to do is to put on the shirt and wear it for a few hours and see if the wrinkles are less noticeable or something. To do that, though, I think I'll have to wait a few days, as it's currently about 55 degrees and rainy.

In the meantime, I'll do some internet research and see if I can find a way to fix this problem. This is definetely the most interesting fitting challenge I've met so far--all my other problems have generally been a matter of taking in shoulders or bust seams.