A Tale of Two Shirts

In an obvious pilfering of Summerset's post about the many people in her life who have encouraged and supported her hobbies, I would also like to recognize the most special person in mine who has been nothing but supportive of me as I continue on my creative journey. My fiance taught me that creativity can be applied to anything you do, whether it be sewing, cooking, or even solving really intense physics problems. From his ever encouragement to ignore time, ignore dinner, ignore pressures, I have learned how to slow down and enjoy the process in almost every aspect of my life. Since, I have no plaque or obelisk to commemorate this recognition, I made him some shirts!


Pattern: The awesome-ness of David Page Coffin's book Shirtmaking for the new shirtmaker can not be emphasized enough. From it I learned how to draft my own pattern, how to construct the button band, the sleeve plackets and the collar.

The first shirt I made was the short-sleeve shirt on the right. The fabric was purchased from the cotton section of Fabric Mart a while back. The shirt was actually intended to be long sleeve but 2 yards of fabric just didn't cut it. This shirt has been dubbed the 'graph paper' shirt.

The second shirt was made after I widened the front by 2" to allow for a little more movement. The fabric is from Gorgeous Fabrics. It is a pink plaid cotton shirting and I doubly love this shirting. Want to know why? Because, you can wash this shirt through the normal wash/dry cycle and it just needs a couple of pats out of the dryer and the shirt looks as if it had already been ironed, now that is an ironing job I can commit to. The shirt won't be crisp, but that agrees with the flavor of the shirt. The fabric is thin compared to the 'graph paper' shirt which allows for lots of layering which is good for our area's weather.

I used fabric interfacing on the 'graph paper' shirt and iron-on interfacing for the pink shirt. I like using the fabric interfacing but for some reason I think the iron-on interfacing makes a more manageable collar. Both shirts use a double yoke and as David Page Coffin implores I used a rolled hem foot for the hem and a hemmer foot to do the side seams.

One more picture of the details:

What more can you ask for? Both shirts fit, albeit one better than the other, and he supports my hobbies to the point where a guy with primarily blue, and all shades of blue, in his wardrobe is now walking around town in a pink shirt.