Oh Shirt!

from josh the sewer

Last week was my week of shirts. My first project was this pictured short sleeve “chillin’ shirt” that I made using the Kwik Sew 3422, my first attempt at making a men’s shirt using a pattern, as opposed to an old cut-up shirt (which worked well enough). For the fabric I choose this Joel Dewberry “Sunburst Pattern.” I picked this up at Fabric Depot, while I was getting the sewist-in-law her cutting mat (which was deeply discounted). As an aside (which I think you can probably tell I use a lot of) this was the trip that deeply influenced my ongoing annoyance with the place. See, I drank a lot of ice tea that day and had to use the toilet very badly and to my dismay the men’s toilets were still the porta-potties out front. Now it is a fair point that there are more women there than men; and while the toilets are being renovated it is only fair that they get indoor accommodations. However, this little project has been going on for a long time and I am at a point in my life where porta-potties just don’t cut it. It was basically an uncomfortable and quick trip to the Depot.

Back to the shirt, I went with view B---the short sleeves and the collar and “stand in one.” The pattern was really well laid out and I could make sense of it myself until the collar. It came together really nicely and fits well. The seam allowances were only ¼ inch and everything else I have had made was 5/8 or ½ inch, it seemed somewhat tight---since I kept forgetting what the seam allowances were. When I do this shirt again, which I will, I am going to use the collar and stand from view A, I just think it will look better. Probably will add a bit for seam allowances, just to make for a more pleasant sewing experience. Also, I really liked that the shirt has a traditional shirt-tail in the back, and the way the placket is made. It gives the shirt a traditional, maybe even retro look.


My major boo-boo was I took a chunk out of the front of the collar stand area while trying to trim some threads, I tried to cover it up with the buttonhole. Oh, yeah, and then I did the same thing somehow and had to "cover" that one up with a button. Not really sure how I managed to pull that off---twice.


More shirts.

The other project was this week was that I took two of my ugly old dress shirts and made them into short sleeve shirts. This was easy, snip-snip, sew-sew. The first shirt was a cheap paisley number from Target. It never worked as long sleeve shirt and being out of clean shirts and not wanting to roll the sleeves, I did the surgery and the sewist hemmed it real quick like (she was working on the Princess Shirt and was sitting in front of the machine).

The second shirt is this incredibly ugly red washed silk shirt by Claiborne, for which I paid 4 dollars at Dillard’s in New Mexico. While living there, I went on this spree of buying close out clothing, trying not to spend more than 8 dollars for an article of clothing. Hell, the fact is that these shirts had buttons gave me a professional look in the City Different. It makes a great ugly beer-drinking shirt now.