Ehm... Jeans and a shirt!

So, finally, time available to myself and to E coincided with decent weather so we could take some pictures. I've finished the trousers a week and a half ago and the early in last week. 

I suppose a bit of a confession is in order: I seem to have made skinny jeans. I didn't set out to do so but there's no way to deny it. 

In fact, I was looking for a good fabric for some nice 1950's style cigarette trousers when I found this rather nice stretch denim at my favorite market stall (De Griek Modestoffen, for those of you who are local. It's available in several colours and they still have plenty of it for 4 euros a meter). So, I bought the fabric. And then, I started thinking and sketching about what to make exactly. The fabric being denim, I thought I should add some actual jeans styling but most of the vintage jeans details I like only make sense for more loose-fitting styles. So, I deviated and came up with something of my own.

The rise is between modern and vintage: The top edge of these trousers is about 2 cm above the natural waist (there is no separate waistband) but the crotch curve is modern (close fitting). All the darts needed for such a high-rise style are hidden in the pocket seam and the pieced back yoke. And of course, there is a solid facing inside, doing the job of a waistband. This sketch is pretty rough, and I should point out that the real thing is in no way lopsided but I think it helps explain things anyway.

For years and years, I've claimed skinny jeans were not for me but these are pretty nice. I was even inspired to try out the dreaded jeans-in-boots look and I even liked that... Of course, I guess I could claim my invention has little in common with the standard low-rise skinnies. I might even be right about that. But still... I've already bought more fabric like this in a darker colour too.

With the trousers finished, I started thinking about how to show them off. One of my reasons to want this rise was because I like to have some pairs of trousers which can be worn with the tops tucked in retro style. 
However, all of those existing tops were short-sleeved. And we my be lucky enough to enjoy a very mild autumn, long sleeves are getting useful by now. So, I thought it might be time to try and make something along the line of a classic white shirt. Of course I'm using off-white because I will be the one wearing it. I used cotton with a bit of stretch from my stash and made a fairly simple pattern. I eliminated the bust darts (there's a pattern trick for that with some of the material going to the armscye and some elsewhere), simply didn't make any of the waist darts and made a back yoke. I drafted the sleeves according to instructions for a man's shirt sleeve and added a collar with an extra high stand and single cuffs (which I decided to close with cufflinks anyway). 

It was an experiment in some ways and the result is very wearable but I'm not 100% happy with it. I think the fabric may be slightly too bulky and/or stiff for this style and the sleeve was probably intended for a body with a slightly dropped shoulder so it's just a tiny bit short. And I don't like the drag lines at the cuff. I guess that's what I get for wanting to use men's style pleats on a cuff designed to fit my tiny wrists (my wrists are unusually skinny, it's a fact which has received regular comments in the past). 
Oh, and it looks less than great when worn loose over something but I made it for tucking in, so I'm not going to worry about that.

So, there we have it. This may be as close as I get to 'normal fashion' these days and I actually feel great in it. Some outfit for enjoying autumn...

The shirt

And this is the shirt I made for E.

As you can see, he immediately felt comfortable in it.

I used my usual sloper: the 'tailored shirt block' from Winifred Aldrich's Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear.

And here you can see the shirt properly. It's very simple: no pockets, short sleeves and a camp collar. I think I've told this before, but E has a fairly short neck and really doesn't like tight, high collars. So, when I started sewing for him, I tried to find a solution. Camp collars are where that ended up.
The fabric is the same white and black cotton plaid I used for his robe last year. For this shirt, I made the front facings and the under collar in thin black cotton and stitched everything in black. 
Of course, I made an effort to match the plaid, at least at the horizontal lines in the body. I made it work pretty well.

And here's a little detail I didn't show in my previous post: how to cut the back yoke.
I can't take any credit for this neat little trick. It's from David Page Coffin's Shirtmaking.
The idea is simple: When you're wearing a shirt, people are going to pay more attention to its fit and design from the front than from the back. If you choose a fabric with stripes or checks and you cut the back yoke on the fold (as usual in most patterns), you'll end up with angled, broken lines at the front edge of the yoke. Which is where people will see them. Quite often, you'll also get some odd line action at the back because most shirt yokes are slightly curved at the bottom.
So, instead, you cut the yoke in two pieces and aline each front edge with the lines in the fabric. Of course, this will result in a center back seam and a slight 'A' shape at the back but I think that's a small price to pay for the nice look at the front. Certainly with E's hairstyle.
If the fabric you are using changes shape easily when use off grain, it's important to make a double yoke with the inside cut on the fold. In this fabric, that wasn't needed.
And I don't know if you can tell from this picture, but I went one step further yet and also cut the front edges of the collar along the stripes of the plaid.

And of course, I used the two tricks I showed you in the previous post, to get a nice finish at those hems.

Shirt details

I'm making a new shirt for E. One with short sleeves. It's been a while but I've made so many that all my shirt-making habits are well established. And short sleeved shirts are quick to make because they lack some of the most labour-intensive bits of a shirt: sleeve slits and cuffs.

In this post, I thought I'd share some of the details of this shirt. Details which are easy to make but apparently not very common. At least, I've never seen them on other blogs.

First: Nice, simple, professional looking, decorative hems for short shirt sleeves. I've seen hem like these in RTW and they're easy to make if you plan ahead.

It starts with the pattern: Trace your pattern on a piece of paper, decide on the sleeve length you want and draw a straight line for the hem. Determine how deep you want your hem to be and draw a line below and parallel to the hem at that distance (mine is 3,5 cm). Cut the paper you don't need off along that line, then fold along the line for the hem and cut out the sleeve. This way, the shape of the sides of the sleeves will be mirror in the bit for the hem.
Now, you can cut out the sleeves as usual.

The sewing of the sleeve hem happens at the usual stage in the construction of the shirt: near the end, when the whole thing has been assembled and all it still needs are hems, buttons and buttonholes.

With the shirt inside out, press the hem width to the inside of the sleeve.

Turn the sleeve up further, at the same width and press again, encasing the raw edge in the new fold.

Stitch at about 0,5 cm this fold.

Fold it back again and press flat.

Turn the shirt right side out. Your sleeve has been hemmed without any ugly edges on show. It has a sort of mock-cuff or mock-turn-up (the stitching is hard to see on my sleeve because I stitched exactly on the black stripe) which is in fact nothing more than a tuck, parallel to the hemline, which just happens to work as a hem too.

The second thing I wanted to show you is a simple cheat's method for hemming curved shirt tails. I've never liked fiddling with those narrow hems which pull at the  shaped bits on the bottom of a shirt. And I'm not above using techniques I've learned in dress making for menswear.
I use bias tape. The regular store-bought variety, cotton for E, cotton or satin for myself. Preferably fairly narrow, 1 or 1,5 cm.

Stitch in the fold, on the right side of the shirt. If you're using a facing at the front, let the tape end in the facing. If you want to hem the whole front, let the tape extend about 1,5 cm at the front edges so you can fold those back to form a finished edge.

Press the tape to the inside of the shirt, in such a way that the seam falls in the inside.

Stitch the tape down along its edge. 

And there you have it. An effortless curved hem.

I hope everything is clear and you can use these finishing details.
I'll show you the shirt properly later this week.

Summer is coming

So, I finished the Lacroix shirt last week when it was raining outside. Today, the weather has turned again and it was sunny the whole day. Quite suitable for what does, after all, look quite a lot like a Hawai shirt.

And since I didn't have an opportunity to take pictures earlier...

I asked E to help get some nice-ish photographs of my new shirt. He's been doing a great job with the camera this month (like the green cape pictures) and he usually manages to capture me smiling...
He did so today as well but unfortunately our timing was quite a bit less than perfect for the light in our home. So, my apologies for the dark pictures and for those which look a bit bleached and/or grainy because I had to make them lighter in photoshop.

This is how I envisioned this shirt. Tucked in retro style.

However, I don't hate it like this either...

I've just finished these trousers, by the way. Another pair of my good old self drafted go-to flared leg pattern. Not exciting enough to get a post of their own but very welcome for day-to-day wear.

The look of this shirt is a bit out of my comfort zone. So much print. E, ever honest but diplomatic, said it looked "different but nice". 

I am loving the fit though. I added some room for the bigger cup size and although it doesn't have waist darts, I did shape the sideseams to get a bit of shape. At center back I added some extra ease to make those little pleats at the back yoke a bit more substantial (see the technical sketch in this post). 

Oh, and it helps that this fabric has just about the perfect weight and hand for this kind of shirt. Maybe it was meant for shirts...

And we made some silly pictures as well.

Oh, la lacroix!

Take a look at this fabric (the colour is a bit off in this picture, the ones at the end of this post show it properly):

I picked it up at the market about a year ago. It was on sale for 1 euro a meter and there was another colourway as well (which I didn't like: yellow instead of read and pinks where this one has blues...). I liked the unusual print: wild, random flowers on a large scale. And looking closer, I was puzzled by the signature: Christian Lacroix. What the...

I don't know if it's 'real' or not. A lot of market sellers buy remnants where-ever they can find them so this could be genuine designer fabric left over from a collection years ago. It could also be a fabric produced for some Christian Lacroix line but never used there and sold off by the bolt. And of course, it's very likely to be some kind of fake. But even then it's probably based on the look of some Lacroix collection. I'd like to know which one. 

Christian Lacroix is not a designer I know a lot about. 

The fabric is a bit out of my comfort zone. I usually go for plain fabrics or small, un-obstrusive prints. But I like this one. It looks fresh and summery. And it's a lovely soft but stable cotton.

Because the fabric is so bold, I thought it would be best to make a simple garment. A short sleeved shirt.

I thought about kimono sleeves but then I decided it would be good to break up this huge print with seams.

So, this is what I went with: a very basic design (and a rather rough sketch). Convertible collar, back yoke with small pleats, plain, normally set short sleeves. The only slightly unusual feature being the bust darts which rise, 'French dart' style, from the waistline. I may or may not add back darts. 

In my mind, this is a shirt to wear tucked into my high waisted skirts or trousers.

Oh, and I'm thinking about using red buttons.

As simple as it may be, it is a bit of a test as well: this is the first garment in which I've tried to correct for my current, larger, cup size. I didn't really have to because nearly all of my self-drafted things still fit (which has to be because I used to put in just a bit more ease at the bust, for proportion's sake) but I wanted to try it anyway.

This is how far I've come today: it still needs the fiddly bits: collar, hems, buttons and buttonholes. And side seams, of course. 

Oh, I may use red buttons...

I'm liking it so far, but I'm very curious to see it on. 

Back to the sewing machine!

Check mate

Thank you for all the nice comments on my coat!
The succesful completion of a big project like this has really helped with my sewing mojo. Nevertheless, I decided to take on a simple and fairly un-selfish project first: another shirt for E.* (my apologies for the focus issues in the close-ups. the light was terrible)

I always keep an eye out for fabrics which would work for fis clothes but menswear stuff is so much harder to find. And his taste isn't very adventurous. So, despite owning an overflowing stash, I immediately bought this cotton flannel when I found it at the market (could be a cotton polyesther blend, the burn test revealed a bit of synthetic in it). It's lovely and soft and has the right weight and hand for a winter shirt. They were selling several designs, so I may go back for more. The only, rather serious, drawback was the width of this fabric: 90 cm. I needed more than 3 m for this single shirt and I'm very good at cutting fabric economically. Luckily, I noticed this issue when buying and got 4 m. And the (lack of) width was reflected in the price.

As usual, I used the shirt sloper I made for E years ago, using the "tailored shirt block" from Winifred Aldrich's Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear. Like most times, I added a convertible collar instead of a classic collar and stand because E prefers it in wearing. And I completed the look with pockets with flaps. I chose not to make a contrast button band this time (so I had to be extra careful about matching the horizontals at the front).

Of course, I played with the checks a bit. I took care with the placement of the back darts, matched the horizontal lines at side and underarm seams, at the sleeve plackets and, as mentioned before at the front.

The back yoke, cuffs and pockets and flaps were cut on the bias. I stabilized the yoke by giving it an on-grain facing. For the cuffs and flaps, I used fusible interfacing and on-grain facings. Only the pockets themselves at 'unsupported' bias cut bits but I took great care in pressing them in shape and sewing them on the (on-grain) shirt fronts. 

A little detail, because it may be helpful to some of you: I like the look of rounded shirt tail, but I don't like fiddling endlessly to hem them. And I don't like the badly twisting hems you often get on such shapes. I often use this very simple cheat's trick: take (store bought) bias tape and sew along the bottom of the shirt (right sides together) in one of the folds, press to the inside of the shirt and topstitch along the edge. Et voila: an effortlessly curved hem.


* Of course I know a man's shirt doesn't count as an easy project in everyone's book, but I've made so many by now...

Once more - the curve collar

Several people asked me for a close-up of the Pattern Magic curve collar. I should have thought about that. Not everyone reading this blog actually has those books...

Today, I took some pictures of the shirt on the dress form.

Pattern Magic - the curve collar shirt

Well, here it is. I made a shirt with the curved collar from Pattern Magic 1.

In fact, this is a fairly easy little project, but I'll try to show you a bit of the construction because, if you're used to sewing regular shirt collars, it is a bit counter-intuitive at times.

I tried to take pictures to clarify the steps but it is really hard to take clear pictures of sewing-in-progress by lamp-light. So please, let me know whether or not this actually helps.

First of all, it may not have been clearly on display in my previous post about this shirt, but this is the actual pattern piece for the collar.

This is my version, which includes a 1 cm seam allowance. I normally use 1.5 cm, but I really recommend going for less here because these seams will all end up inside the collar and it will be much easier to manipulate its curves and angles with a smaller seam allowance. Just remember to match this 1 cm seam allowance on the collar edges of the bodice and on the neckline of the facing. And, as I mentioned before, you really need a facing for the front and back.

I cut the collar with the larger piece, the actual collar, on the fold and used a light fusible interfacing.

When sewing the shirt, the first step is to sew and finish the shoulder seams on the bodice and facing and, if you make a shirt like mine, sew the back pleat.

Then, close the center back seam on the curve-bit of the collar and press open.

Then, pin and sew the 'gap' which exists now. To do this, you pin the center back seam to the center back of the collar piece and sew from point to point (I marked those points with a little hole on my pattern piece and with chalk on

the fabric) like a double ended dart.

After that, sew the front edges for the collar by folding it right sides together (I marked the middle of the collar piece, where you should fold it, with a notch) and sewing it down. Make sure not to sew down the seam allowance at the edge.

That's the prep work on the collar done. Now, it's time to start attaching it.

First step is to sew the point-bit of the collar pieces curve bit to the point at the front bodice. This is exactly where you took it out in the pattern making stage. Refer back to that and it can't go wrong. Just make sure not to sew down to far.

The next step is to sew the collar edge onto to bodice, beginning and ending at the ends of the seams you've made in the previous step. This should give you neat little corners on the front bodice.

Now, sew the facing to the collar neckline (the curvey bit) and along the front opening.

With that, the construction is basically done. Pattern Magic tells you to stitch parts of the collar to facing by hand. I opted for stitching in the ditch (not all the way round. Just a couple of cm at the front points and along the center back) instead, which so far seems to work just fine.

To add some details about my shirt, the fabric is a cream coloured, fairly soft cotton. I don't normally go for this kind of embroidery decoration but I bought it, once more, on crazy sale at the market, so I figured I could always use it for muslins. As it turned out, I actually like it.

As mentioned in my previous post, I made a center back pleat which I closed from the waist down so the shirt can be tucked in neatly. I added very simple plain three quarter length sleeves, on a natural shoulderline. After some consideration, I added one chest pocket. With that it's not just about the collar.

When I wore this outfit to take a picture, my boyfriend came in. He first said he liked the look. Only then, he asked: 'is the collar supposed to stand up like that?' Of course, I said yes and he said it was nice, but the point is this: it is both a very strange and a very subtle detail. Just how I like it.

Curve-collar shirt - a start

Once again, I've sort of promised you something of which I wasn't quite sure how to do it. And then, I didn't get to it in the time I said I would. I know: What else is new?

Luckily for me, I didn't promise a how-to (mainly for reasons of copyright. if you want to know how to draft that collar, you'll have to buy or borrow Pattern Magic 1).

So, here's my not-a-how-to of the pattern for my design including Pattern Magic 1's curved collar.

I started out with the pattern I made for my little silk shirt which, at least in my mind, is a pretty basic semi-fitted shirt (if it got a tiny bit snug in the bust in its silk incarnation, that's because of those pintucks).

I kept the bust dart and folded the front pattern piece at the center front line. From there, I followed the instructions for the collar as they are explained in the book.

At the back, I decided not to use the waist dart. I also added 6 cm all along the center back (which was already meant to be cut on the fold) for the back pleat. If I decide to have it stitched up from the waist down, I may still remove the extra fabric below that point. But for now, I keep the options open. Here as at the front, I just followed the book's instructions for that neckline.

After following the directions for the collar itself and adding a simple, straight threequarter length sleeve, these are my finished pattern pieces:

What you may not realise if you use Pattern Magic in Japanese, is that you will need a front and back facing which reach up to the actual neckline of the garment (so, the inner neckline of the curved bit, not the 'neckline' on the bodice pieces).

Now, I've cut these pieces from my fabric. I've placed the center back of the collar itself (and not the curved bit) at the fold, so I'll let you know whether or not that was a good decision. I intend to use a lightweight interfacing on the collar and facing.

I'm going to start sewing now. I'll be back with an update as soon as I have anything to tell.

Pattern Magic collars

When posting about my sewing plans for 2012, I mentioned wanting to make more garments with Pattern Magic details. Although I won't have much time for sewing this week, I want to make a careful little start on this.

What I want to start with, are shirts with the nice, unusual collar designs from Pattern Magic 1. I've seen the double collar on a blog once, and the curve collar never. This may be because, like Carolyn (link goes to her blog, I can't find the specific post) mentioned, these projects describe the collars only, not full garments. It's not hard to incorporate them in any old shirt pattern though. Or indeed, to draft one using a sloper. Which is what I'll be doing.

These are the designs I have in mind. For both collars, I tried to come up with blouses which, in my opinion, suit their shape and style.

There's something soft and rather Japanese about the curve collar. Which is why I think it will go well with a fairly loose fitting body with three quarter length sleeves (either straight or with some fullness lightly gathered at the bottom). I added a back pleat simply because I like to do something at the back as well. This particular kind of back pleat (stitched up at the bottom) is a common feature in 1930's clothes and will look well with the shirt tucked in. Obviously, the bottom of the pleat could be left open for a more flared shape.

The double collar vaguely reminds me of those rigid Edwardian stock collars. Because of that, I saw it immediately with a fitted and detailed kind of shirt. So: armhole princess seams and a pleated lower back panel. Long sleeves with french cuffs. If you want to go for a real Victorian inspired look, you could make leg-o-mutton sleeves, but I won't this time.

I am going to make both of these shirts. If anyone would like to make something similar, I'm happy to share the drafting process here on my blog. I'm not going to make this a sew-along, so you don't have to want to make this right now. Also, I'm not going to show how to do the collars exactly because I think that might a violation of the Pattern Magic copyright. So, it's basically for anyone who has the Pattern Magic book but doesn't get around to making a 'detail' project like this.

If you're interested, just say so in the comments and tell me which shirt you'd like to see/try first.