Matt’s Birthday Negroni Shirt

Once again, I have been a bit absent on this blog lately. Between ukulele lessons on Tuesday nights (plus practice throughout the week) and my knitting group on Wednesday nights and then trying to get some exercise occasionally and balance family life (in-laws were in town, Matt turned 40), I have been BUSY! 2015 is shaping up to be an awesome year so far, so these are good problems to have. I’m just living life in real-time, yo.

I have been making stuff, I’m just backlogged on blogging about it. So let’s start with Matt’s birthday shirt! I wish I could say I made him a birthday suit, because that would be funnier, but it’s just a shirt… so, anyway…

Pattern- Colette Pattern’s Negroni

Fabric- Plaid shirting from the remnant/sale table at Pacific Fabrics, so it was cheap!.

Made Version 1 (long sleeve) in size large

Alterations- Added 1″ width to cuff and sleeve. I also used the free downloadable pocket variations, so that I could make him the pointed pocket, instead of rounded.

Total time to make including muslin and fitting- 30 hrs.

Notes-  I cut as many things on the bias as I could: the back yoke, the pockets, the cuffs and the placket. I did this to add visual interest and also to decrease the amount of pattern matching I had to do, as per the following resources. I also looked at some of Matt’s other/similar shirts to see how they were constructed bias-wise and placement of buttons, etc..

Resources-

http://www.coletterie.com/tutorials-tips-tricks/how-to-match-plaids-and-stripes

http://lladybird.com/2013/10/17/tutorial-matching-plaids-like-a-boss/

What I learned- This was my first time sewing a men’s garment and I learned that I really enjoyed sewing it! I love the clean lines and the way this shirt is constructed. I also love the way it is finished. It is mostly flat felled seams with facings in the front. The neck and back yoke seams are encased by an inner yoke, so there is not a single serged seam in this shirt!

And the placket! Look at that placket! There was some cool ass fabric origami required to create that placket and I was skeptical at first, but it totally worked and wasn’t hard at all.

I used pearl snaps instead of buttons, to give it more of western shirt feel. Since Matt has a thing for odd numbers (he prefers them and now so do I, so now we are both weirdos), he requested an odd number of snaps, so he got 7 snaps in the front instead of 6. See, these are the kind of customizations you can get with a homemade shirt!

Look at that plaid matching and those flat felled seams!

I think the sleeves could be a little shorter, because the plackets look a little bunched up in the back to me, but Matt says he likes the length. He also usually wears his sleeves rolled up, so as long as he is happy!

Look at my handsome logman!

I love this shot of him and Wyatt too!

I’m so happy with how this shirt turned out and that it is something Matt will actually wear. He wore it to his birthday dinner and everyone there thought that it was store-bought, so that’s a compliment! He also said it feels better than store-bought, because the facings and inner yoke give it a finish and heft that seems nicer than some of his other similar plaid shirts. He did say that he won’t feel super comfortable wearing this shirt until he has two of them, so I guess that was his way of saying he would like another one. 😉

All this plaid matching and shirt-making has been great practice for my next project, where I get to go back to selfish sewing and make myself a plaid Grainline Archer shirt! By this point, it should be a breeze, right?