I’m excited to be back to share another installment of my series of the Search for the Perfect T-Shirt. I’m here today to talk a little bit about the Panama Tee and Panama Tee Dress from Alina Design Co.
I sewed up the Panama Tee Dress last week one night after work and was so pleasantly surprised how much I loved it. I’ve mentioned before, but I am not a dress person usually, but as I mentioned in my Wardrobe Staples post yesterday, I have been so into t-shirt dresses. After loving the dress, I decided to sew up the t-shirt version in addition to the dress to include in this series.
The Panama Dress and Tee has “subtle side shaping and a small amount of ease for an easy fit that hits you in all of the right places and skims over all of the others” — and I can’t agree with that description more! It offers three views – an easy fit tee, a knee length dress and a maxi length. It has three different sleeve lengths – short, elbow and long sleeves. It also has an option breast pocket as well.
I love the flexibility on this pattern and while it only features one neckline, Alina has an amazing blog post for various neckline hacks. She includes explanations on how to draft a v-neck, scoop and boat neck neckline to change up the look. I know I’ll be trying the scoop neck very shortly!
I made up the size 8, which lines up pretty close to my measurements, although I probably am halfway between an 8 and 10. I think it fits totally well for me with the exception of the sleeves – I think I could use a little bit more room in the sleeves. I think that might be mitigated if I do the elbow length sleeve or long sleeve, but where the short sleeve cuts it’s a bit tight. For the t-shirt I used a totally imprecise method of increasing the sleeve opening size and it gave me a little bit more breathing room. Because of how tight the arms were, I didn’t hem the sleeves, just the bottom of the dress. I used a double needle and love where the hem hit on me (it is a shorter dress, but I prefer that!)
For the dress, I used a french terry from Style Maker Fabrics and a poly brushed knit from LA Finch Fabrics for the tee. I think both of those choices were the right fabrics to use for each of the garments. I just got in some J.Crew t-shirt jersey from Imagine Gnats that is currently sitting in my dryer, that I want to sew up into a Panama Tee this weekend!
Here’s the summary of my thoughts on the Panama Tee Dress:
Size Chosen: I sewed up the 8 which has measurements of 36, 28, 38 and my measurements are 36, 29, 39.
The Variations Offered: It comes with a couple different length and sleeve variations but only one neck variation. Alina does have a blog post for different neck variations.
Ease of Construction: Easy! I used my sewing machine to sew all of the top and it came together really quickly.
The Fit: I really like the fit of this t-shirt and t-shirt dress. Both have a really nice shape to them! I like that they’re both more fitted tees than some of the other tees out there.
This is post 4 of a series of my search for the perfect t-shirt, if you’ve missed the other posts make sure to check out the intro post here, the first post in my series the Sunny Dress here and the second post in my series the Seamly Basic Tee here.