McCalls 6044 Shirt – Take 3

Woo hello! Long time no speak and all of that. I’ve been busy, but not idle, although the blog would have you believe otherwise. It’s lies, damned lies! In fact I have a plethora of projects to show you and plenty in the pipeline. I’m at the start of a 4-day weekend here in the UK (day off tomorrow and Monday is our last Bank Holiday before Christmas!) and I’ve got a few projects planned in to work on.

After making the last two McCalls 6044 shirts for T (blogged here), I wanted to work on one that was slightly more wintery… as there’s one short-sleeved and one long-sleeved from a thin cotton. This time, I had lined up a thicker checked fabric that would work quite nicely:

See how beautifully I matched the right front and placket? Unfortunately due to how men’s shirts button up, nobody will ever actually see that detail! 😀

There’s also a bit of weirdness where for some reason the fabric has developed little holes:

I’m not sure what the blend of fabric is as I bought the fabric from Fabworks (in-store, not online) and so didn’t have any details of fabric composition. It definitely has some polyester in it, but it’s surprisingly rough and almost itchy to work with. It also didn’t want to press – which posed its own set of problems. I did a few different things with this shirt. On account of the fabric being a bit itchy and the finished shirt unlikely to be a favourite, I decided to overlock the seams on my new overlocker rather than flat-fell them as I normally do. I was testing different tensions etc with it, so I left in the different coloured threads – makes for a nice effect inside:

I also tried to sew my first tower plackets on a sleeve – using the instructions from the Colette Negroni. This didn’t go so well, but it’s nothing to do with the instructions. It’s a combination of the fabric not pressing well which made things super fiddly and my using the pattern’s 2-piece sleeve. It turns out the kind of placket I was sewing only works with a 1-piece sleeve – leaving me with some raw seams that I couldn’t easily squirrel away. But, for a first attempt, they went together and they look ok! Even if on one of them, the placket doesn’t fully cover the bit underneath. You’ll see what I mean:

Erk – see what I mean? And I’m a little embarrassed about the wonky stitching!

Icky raw seams:

Second one was better though!

It’s all a good learning experience and I know my next ones will be better. And my beautiful clapper helped plenty too:

You can buy one like this from the same vendor on Etsy here!

I made my usual amend to the back yoke – changing it out from a Western-style pointy yoke to a straight line:

Onto the final pictures!

And that’s it! There’s another shirt in the pipeline for T and lots of exciting things for me! What’s great is that I still feel like I’m learning lots with every project I do and more importantly, I’m having fun. Now I have my overlocker I’m getting a hankering for a coverstitch machine, but that’s probably a post for another day.

Have a great weekend everyone!