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craftgrrlThis is not a tutorial, it's a chronicle. The LJ format isn't adequate for the length of the post I'd need to tell you HOW to do what I did.
This is the shirt I'm so FIGJAM! about:
Yes, it looks rumpled -- that's what the client loved about the original shirt, and I looked hard to find heavy enough cotton ticking to replicate that texture. :-) What's the big deal? you wonder. This shirt is a copy of an existing French Connection men's shirt, and I created the pattern without taking the original garment apart. And I had to figure out how to do the front details... and how to fold the button placket that was self-faced, and... I love working with crisp cotton. It's got a nice heft to it, and it sounds like marcescent leaves in the winter, and it takes a crease like paper...
Cross-posted to![[profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
sew_hip and my journal
This is the shirt I'm so FIGJAM! about:
Yes, it looks rumpled -- that's what the client loved about the original shirt, and I looked hard to find heavy enough cotton ticking to replicate that texture. :-) What's the big deal? you wonder. This shirt is a copy of an existing French Connection men's shirt, and I created the pattern without taking the original garment apart. And I had to figure out how to do the front details... and how to fold the button placket that was self-faced, and... I love working with crisp cotton. It's got a nice heft to it, and it sounds like marcescent leaves in the winter, and it takes a crease like paper...
First: some shots of the original shirt:
This is the original shirt front, right side. The "ruffles" here are actually the raw edges of the seam allowances - each front piece was done in FOUR sections. And they weren't just straight-cut pieces, they were all slightly curved at the waist to add just a teeny bit of flare and fitting to the bottom. It took a bit of puzzling to realize I hadn't shifted the pieces as I'd pinned them down.
This bit between my fingers is the seam on the WRONG side of the garment, where the "ruffles" are. There were no raw or serged edges showing inside this shirt, except where they were used as embellishment. I'm not quite that skilled yet, to make flat-felled seams on sleeves, so the client gave me permission to construct the garment the way I needed to, as long as it didn't change the external appearance. Notice the lines of decorative stitching. It's hard to find a men's shirt with some embellishments that don't make the man look like he's headed for the altar, or to the prom. This is why the client asked if I could replicate this shirt - he just couldn't find another one like it.
Onward to actually constructing.
Thank-you for pointing out that David Coffin YouTube video
on how to pin-trace a shirt. I used a piece of cardboard under my tracing web for the pin-pricking, and laid out the garment flat. In retrospect, I should have used something higher-contrast than the cardboard, as it was pretty difficult to see the pinholes on my tracing web. :-) Once the piece of shirt has been pricked onto the paper, you just connect the dots, and add your seam allowance (I like 5/8", but the usual S.A. is 1/4"). When tracing your sleeves, it helps to put in a reference pin where your front and back sleeve notches would be on the yoke and fronts.
I'm not going to give you "action sewing" shots. :-) I think we all know what sewing looks like by now. In my case, I had to make two mock-ups ("muslins") of this shirt: one to make sure I'd accurately replicated the pattern, and the next with fitting adjustments, as I had to widen the back by 2", lengthen the sleeves by about 1-1/2", and make sure the side seams tapered back to the original waist measurement (yes, the client was a nice triangle-shaped man, and a right pleasure to fit; it seems he'd bought the shirt before he'd finished growing up).
Finished shirt front detail shot, with a good look at the not-pointy collar point. You can see my serged edges are not rumply or ruffly yet - the original shirt was at least 5 years old, with 5 years' worth of launderings. I expect these edges to get worn a little like that.
I tried to follow David Coffin's instructions on how to turn the collar points, but I just didn't have the knack, and this was the second collar I'd cut and stitched. (I thought I'd perfected, after many stitchings and rippings, the first collar, and just as I was about to topstitch it and put it in the collar stand, I realized I'd sewn it inside-out - the interfacing was showing!!!) The collar looks nice enough, and will rumple just as nicely as the original has. I should mention, though it's not shown here, that I had to cut and taper my own removable collar tabs. Fabricland doesn't carry them, nor any of the nearby fabric stores, and I didn't have the opportunity to drive down to Queen Street in Toronto to look for them -- the kids' school day isn't that long! Do not underestimate the usefulness of those killer plastic packing blisters! You know, the kind you get your Wii accessories in? The kind that slice your hands open as you try to get the nunchak out? Yeah, that plastic. It's great for making collar tabs because you can cut it with your craft scissors and not get rough edges and burrs that will snag the fabric.
I also learned how to do a proper sleeve placket with David Coffin's "Shirtmaking" book. It's confusing at first, but I had the muslins for practice material, and after a couple of trials and errors (and my good friend the stitch ripper) I saw my first perfect placket ever. Actually stitching the things into the sleeves is dead easy. It's the folding that makes you want to cry. My Janome Workhorse balked at stitching these buttonholes, though. It sounded like a jackhammer going through three laters of heavy cotton ticking, and the seam allowance bulked it just enough to make it think it was finished stitching one side of the buttonhole when it really was only halfway there, so I had to wrestle with it a little. I considered hauling out my Kenmore Juggernaut, but I never did learn how to properly create a buttonhole without that lovely modern convenience of a one-step... *sheepish look* The Workhorse and I reached an agreement: he would stitch the damn buttonholes, and I'd give him the next two weeks off. And he liked sewing the birthday Blanket Monster mid-way through this project, so he didn't complain too loudly.
This is what I call a "mock-felled" seam. It's not actually flat-felled. I tried to do the actual flat-felled, but without the felling foot, it looked so... amateur. And I was paid to make this shirt. So what I did was stitch my 5/8" seam allowance, grade one raw edge to 1/4", and pressed the wider one over that. Then I top-stitched it down, to encase all raw edges. It works great on straight and gently-curved seams, but is very fiddly on sharp curves and sleeves. I serged the hem's raw edge and gathered the stitches slightly in the curves, so they wouldn't pucker as I stitched the hem, and I serged the seam allowance in the sleeve and side seams. The exterior of the garment shows no difference.
I will have to master flat-felling my seams another time. (For an example of flat-felling, look at the seams on your Levi's jeans. Where you see two rows of stitches, those are flat-felled. If you fold the cuff up at the bottom of your leg, the seam will look just the same as the outside: no raw edges.)
And here's the back of the finished shirt. The sleeves look a little weird, hanging so far below the hem, but the client wanted to keep the original garment length, while adding 1-1/2" to the sleeves. With the shoulder seams widened 1" each, I had to taper the garment at the side seams from just below the armpits to the hem, to bring it back in line with the original waist measurement. The hem wasn't rolled, but you can't tell the difference here. And yes, the centre back seam was also one of those fitted seams, that's why it drapes like this. I didn't change it there at all, I went for the split-it-down-the-middle widening option. (I posted a question at the end of December about widening the shoulders here, and how to adjust the other pieces.) On the front, I split the widest pattern piece down the grain, and added my inch there, and adjusted the yoke seam line to fit by taping the tops of the pattern pieces together, and tracing a new seamline on my tracing web. Oh, and there is not a scrap of fusible interfacing on this shirt. It's all cotton ticking. I'm kind of proud of that, too, because it meant I had to trim the interfacing really, really close to the seamline, and make sure it was caught in the topstitches, without shifting between the outer layers of cuff and collar.
In all, heavy cotton is my favourite sewing medium. It's durable, has a multiplicity of finishes, and it can be adapted to just about anything you want it to do. I haven't been this jazzed about sewing, nor felt such a sense of accomplishment, in a very long time. I feel not a whit of reluctance to signing my name on the seam allowance of this garment, and that's a first.
This is the original shirt front, right side. The "ruffles" here are actually the raw edges of the seam allowances - each front piece was done in FOUR sections. And they weren't just straight-cut pieces, they were all slightly curved at the waist to add just a teeny bit of flare and fitting to the bottom. It took a bit of puzzling to realize I hadn't shifted the pieces as I'd pinned them down.
This bit between my fingers is the seam on the WRONG side of the garment, where the "ruffles" are. There were no raw or serged edges showing inside this shirt, except where they were used as embellishment. I'm not quite that skilled yet, to make flat-felled seams on sleeves, so the client gave me permission to construct the garment the way I needed to, as long as it didn't change the external appearance. Notice the lines of decorative stitching. It's hard to find a men's shirt with some embellishments that don't make the man look like he's headed for the altar, or to the prom. This is why the client asked if I could replicate this shirt - he just couldn't find another one like it.
Onward to actually constructing.
Thank-you for pointing out that David Coffin YouTube video
on how to pin-trace a shirt. I used a piece of cardboard under my tracing web for the pin-pricking, and laid out the garment flat. In retrospect, I should have used something higher-contrast than the cardboard, as it was pretty difficult to see the pinholes on my tracing web. :-) Once the piece of shirt has been pricked onto the paper, you just connect the dots, and add your seam allowance (I like 5/8", but the usual S.A. is 1/4"). When tracing your sleeves, it helps to put in a reference pin where your front and back sleeve notches would be on the yoke and fronts.I'm not going to give you "action sewing" shots. :-) I think we all know what sewing looks like by now. In my case, I had to make two mock-ups ("muslins") of this shirt: one to make sure I'd accurately replicated the pattern, and the next with fitting adjustments, as I had to widen the back by 2", lengthen the sleeves by about 1-1/2", and make sure the side seams tapered back to the original waist measurement (yes, the client was a nice triangle-shaped man, and a right pleasure to fit; it seems he'd bought the shirt before he'd finished growing up).
Finished shirt front detail shot, with a good look at the not-pointy collar point. You can see my serged edges are not rumply or ruffly yet - the original shirt was at least 5 years old, with 5 years' worth of launderings. I expect these edges to get worn a little like that.
I tried to follow David Coffin's instructions on how to turn the collar points, but I just didn't have the knack, and this was the second collar I'd cut and stitched. (I thought I'd perfected, after many stitchings and rippings, the first collar, and just as I was about to topstitch it and put it in the collar stand, I realized I'd sewn it inside-out - the interfacing was showing!!!) The collar looks nice enough, and will rumple just as nicely as the original has. I should mention, though it's not shown here, that I had to cut and taper my own removable collar tabs. Fabricland doesn't carry them, nor any of the nearby fabric stores, and I didn't have the opportunity to drive down to Queen Street in Toronto to look for them -- the kids' school day isn't that long! Do not underestimate the usefulness of those killer plastic packing blisters! You know, the kind you get your Wii accessories in? The kind that slice your hands open as you try to get the nunchak out? Yeah, that plastic. It's great for making collar tabs because you can cut it with your craft scissors and not get rough edges and burrs that will snag the fabric.
I also learned how to do a proper sleeve placket with David Coffin's "Shirtmaking"
book. It's confusing at first, but I had the muslins for practice material, and after a couple of trials and errors (and my good friend the stitch ripper) I saw my first perfect placket ever. Actually stitching the things into the sleeves is dead easy. It's the folding that makes you want to cry. My Janome Workhorse balked at stitching these buttonholes, though. It sounded like a jackhammer going through three laters of heavy cotton ticking, and the seam allowance bulked it just enough to make it think it was finished stitching one side of the buttonhole when it really was only halfway there, so I had to wrestle with it a little. I considered hauling out my Kenmore Juggernaut, but I never did learn how to properly create a buttonhole without that lovely modern convenience of a one-step... *sheepish look* The Workhorse and I reached an agreement: he would stitch the damn buttonholes, and I'd give him the next two weeks off. And he liked sewing the birthday Blanket Monster mid-way through this project, so he didn't complain too loudly.This is what I call a "mock-felled" seam. It's not actually flat-felled. I tried to do the actual flat-felled, but without the felling foot, it looked so... amateur. And I was paid to make this shirt. So what I did was stitch my 5/8" seam allowance, grade one raw edge to 1/4", and pressed the wider one over that. Then I top-stitched it down, to encase all raw edges. It works great on straight and gently-curved seams, but is very fiddly on sharp curves and sleeves. I serged the hem's raw edge and gathered the stitches slightly in the curves, so they wouldn't pucker as I stitched the hem, and I serged the seam allowance in the sleeve and side seams. The exterior of the garment shows no difference.
I will have to master flat-felling my seams another time. (For an example of flat-felling, look at the seams on your Levi's jeans. Where you see two rows of stitches, those are flat-felled. If you fold the cuff up at the bottom of your leg, the seam will look just the same as the outside: no raw edges.)
And here's the back of the finished shirt. The sleeves look a little weird, hanging so far below the hem, but the client wanted to keep the original garment length, while adding 1-1/2" to the sleeves. With the shoulder seams widened 1" each, I had to taper the garment at the side seams from just below the armpits to the hem, to bring it back in line with the original waist measurement. The hem wasn't rolled, but you can't tell the difference here. And yes, the centre back seam was also one of those fitted seams, that's why it drapes like this. I didn't change it there at all, I went for the split-it-down-the-middle widening option. (I posted a question at the end of December about widening the shoulders here, and how to adjust the other pieces.) On the front, I split the widest pattern piece down the grain, and added my inch there, and adjusted the yoke seam line to fit by taping the tops of the pattern pieces together, and tracing a new seamline on my tracing web. Oh, and there is not a scrap of fusible interfacing on this shirt. It's all cotton ticking. I'm kind of proud of that, too, because it meant I had to trim the interfacing really, really close to the seamline, and make sure it was caught in the topstitches, without shifting between the outer layers of cuff and collar.
In all, heavy cotton is my favourite sewing medium. It's durable, has a multiplicity of finishes, and it can be adapted to just about anything you want it to do. I haven't been this jazzed about sewing, nor felt such a sense of accomplishment, in a very long time. I feel not a whit of reluctance to signing my name on the seam allowance of this garment, and that's a first.
Cross-posted to
sew_hip and my journal
