Shirt in a day

On our way downtown to find new
cargo shorts.  I do have my limits.

It's craft show season, so I've been busy at home making things to keep my inventory up.  I tend to wander from project to project, so I don't get bored -- bears one day, dresses the next, potholders on the third day.  Even so, I get a little tired sometimes.

Friday was one of those days.  It was also not too hot, which is good.  My sewing room faces west and in the afternoons it gets somewhere between unbearable and seventh-circle-of-hell.  Friday it was just mildly purgatorial; I can deal with that.  (On really hot days, I retreat to the dining room and cut out masses of projects to be assembled when I can stand the heat.  Yes, I could bring the machine downstairs, but I haven't yet).

So it was comfortable in the workroom, but I didn't feel like working.  Doesn't that figure?  So I decided to clear my head and hone my skills by making Mario a shirt.  Every time I feel like I'm going to fast or getting a little sloppy, I make a shirt.  All that painstaking topstitching slows me down and makes me think about what I'm doing, and why.

He picked out this wallpaper-ish floral a while back at Philadelphia Fabric Outlet.  It's a quilting cotton, technically, and not something I would usually use for a man's shirt, but I don't get as judgmental about short-sleeved summer shirts.  They are what they are, and if I don't have to make cuffs and sleeve plackets with less than cooperative cotton, he can have what he wants.

I'd pre-washed the fabric months ago, when we bought it, but it's been languishing in the living room ever since, in the pile of stuff to be taken into the workroom someday.

I think he likes it!

It made it in, I cut it up, and in 2 1/2 hours, he had a new shirt.  A little slower than my best time for a short-sleeved shirt, but then again, at least an hour less than if I'd had to do cuffs and sleeve plackets.  The collar on this one worked without a fuss -- every once in a while, I get a collar band that just settles onto the shirt like it's meant to be there, but even as often as I've made this pattern (at least 20 times now), I still argue with the collar occasionally.

In case you're interested, the pattern is KwikSew 3422, my favorite pattern to use for him.  Though now that he's lost weight, I think I need to go in a half size for his next dress shirt.  Summer shirts can be roomy; I like a bit more fit in a dress shirt.