Originally written Feb 25, 2024
A few years ago I attended a flea market where I found a soft floral patterned shirt, perfect a hot summer day. Made of a viscose fabric, I fell in love with it and quickly found another similar shirt of the same brand. The problem — one that I face constantly while clothes shopping — was that the shirts weren’t quite long enough.
I knew what I had to do.
I started buying up lengths of viscose and rayon fabrics from others’ stashes, building up my own stash in the process to make my own shirts!
I had made a shirt or two of questionable quality in the past, but I knew for these fabrics, I would need a more reliable, a more worthy solution to making good shirts.
There were a few ways I could have gone about this:
- find a new pattern for my shirts
- make a pattern totally from scratch using men’s pattern-making books
- copy a pattern off of the original shirt
After trying 1 and 2 before and not liking the results, I decided to have a crack at copying the pattern of the flea-market shirt. I won’t go into detail, but the process was easier than I thought. After the initial copy and test-shirt with muslin fabric, I made a few modifications (lengthening the collar and height of the shirt), I was ready to go.
Here are one of the results! It’s my favorite of the shirts. Notice the length: great for tucking into your pants but also keeping any accidental midriff totally un-exposed!
I LOVE these shirts! I’m so happy with how they turned out: they’re comfortable, soft, breezy, and (tooting my own horn) I think I look good in them.
This is exactly the kind of thing I want to do in life: solving the problems I have with modern men’s fashion:
- Size: I have trouble finding shirts of the right size. I typically need a ‘long’ variety that can be found at only so many stores, and typically only online at that. This contributes to issue 2…
- Options: Maybe I’m just sorely unaware of men’s fashion, but to me it seems that women have so many more options when it comes to what is ‘acceptable’ to wear. Pants of various lengths, blouses, shirts, dresses, skirts, blazers, cardigans, all sorts of different shoes… And don’t even get me started on the different fabric patterns they can choose from! In my experience, I as a man don’t have so many options. If women’s shirts fit me, I’d be at the thrift store much more often.
Problems and Lessons
- Collars. They are confusing to put together the first few times.
- Pattern modification: easier when patterns are copied onto tracing fabric! When I needed to lengthen the shirt, I simply sewed a few inches of tracing fabric to the bottom of the shirt blocks, easy-peasy.
- Fray-block: VERY useful for keeping buttons and button-holes in check.
- Serging/overlocking: I have an old overlocker I got from my mother. Even after getting it serviced, the store said it had a few problems. Otherwise it works, but my understanding of it’s working it limited. Luckily all the serged seams are INSIDE the shirt and not outside!
- Delicateness of the fabric: It is important to run them through the washing machine on a gentle cycle and to use a garment bag. I’ve had to repair many split seams, and even a rip or two. Very sad when I notice a rip 🙁
Let’s see if I finish any shirts for 2024…