Blue Skies, Fresh Summer Shirt, Burda grandpa shirt, again, from April 2010 in this year's blue

I stitched up, as I said yesterday, three fresh summer shirts. One of them was the Kenzo wiggly peplum number and another was a 'Margaret Howell' camp or 'boyfriend' shirt, already reviewed.

Meanwhile, light blue seemed to have its moment in the last week or two, judging by the German Burda's choices pictured here and the Guardian newspaper's fashion page below. And blue is my favorite color.

So with some super-cheap IKEA cotton, home-dyed the requisite color of a clear day in spring, I turned to a beloved Burda 'grandfather shirt' pattern, sewn earlier in thin batiste (when I was recovering from the Serious Illness and almost thirty pounds lighter here)

from my favorite  issue of all time, April 2010, and ran up the blue version, (pictured above) lengthening the sleeves a little.

IKEA's cheapo cotton is practically free, but it is heavier than the white batiste I used for the first version. This is more a sort of chambray that softens with washing and is good for a Swiss summer evening over a swimsuit by the lake.

I cut only the needed length of 'natural' colored cotton off my IKEA stash and washed it with  'whitening' detergent so that I had as white as possible a base for the dye to grab hold of, then ran it through the machine with a box of blue dye. Total cost for a sturdy shirt, less than ten bucks.