Shirt details

I finally got around to finishing E's shirt today. Unfortunately, the pictures aren't that great because he's not here to model it and it's another very grey day.

As I told you in my previous post, I made this shirt based on his own sloper. Like most shirts I've made for E, this one has a fairly dark colour, most of the classic shirt details and some casual styling features.

The actual colour of this shirt is olive (well represented in my wardrobe, but not so much in his) but the combination of weak daylight and lamp light in the pictures does a lot to disguise it.

Classic features are the sleeve cuffs (not pictured, you know what men's shirt cuffs look like) and the button band. And the flat felled seams used throughout the shirt.

Less classic is the collar, which doesn't have a stand. E has a fairly short neck and usually wears his shirts with top button open. On the first few shirts I made him, he was forever folding the collars flat. I didn't like the look of that, so after a couple of shirts with half-height stands (which are fussy), I drafted this one-piece convertible collar. Not a feature you see a lot today, but it works well for him. It does require a bit of planning ahead because half of the tops of the button bands need to be finished before attaching the collar.

I used another lazy solution on the hem. Shirt hems are curved and in a densely woven cotton, making a neat rolled hem can be ah... problematic. If I suspect such trouble, I go for this option: purchased biais tape is stitched to the bottom edge of the shirt, pressed to the inside and topstitched. The result is a neat, slightly wider hem.

The styling detail on this shirt are pockets with some working/cargo/survival inspiration. I like how they turned out.

For a while, I didn't like to do pockets on shirts because they are a lot of extra work (I guess I got faster at that in the mean time) and usually not functional. To spice up otherwise too plain shirt, I would do things like this.

Technically, these are pintucks. They are 1 cm wide and there are just two of them, on the right front of the shirt. I've used these with and, in this picture, without pocket flaps and I've also made a shirt with two wider, vertical pintucks. I always use contrast stitching with it. E likes the look and no-one has ever commented on my use of what is usually a womenswear and tuxedo-shirt feature ;)