shirt success!

i finally got all the shirts done that i've been working on for the past couple of weeks.  they turned out great, but i'm good on not making any more shirts for a couple of months.  along with the red and white shirt i demonstrated earlier, i'll show you the slight variations on the basic pattern that i have done with the other shirts.

this guy is actually exactly the same as ethan's shirt, so we'll skip over this one.

this one is my shirt.  i made this henley-inspired pattern a couple of years ago and it's the shirt i wear all the time now--super comfortable, warm, and not fussy but you still kind of look nice even when you haven't bathed in a while.

p.s. it's brown flannel, i don't know why the picture makes it look like velour or something

only one pocket and i don't even bother with the flap

i guess it's called a mandarin collar, but i basically just don't add the upper fold-down collar part.  instead of 2 full rows of buttons and button holes i just sew in a basic placket similar to the ones that go into the cuffs.  i actually made this shirt first (of all four) and hadn't figured out how to do the fancy placket yet--maybe on the next one.

and instead of cuffs i add on some sweatshirt waist-banding material.  i'm constantly pushing my sleeves up and i got tired of rolling, so this compromise works great. i was actually going to just buy some brown socks and cut the feet off of to use as the cuffs, but as luck would have it i helped my friend make a chicken leg halloween costume a couple of weeks ago and we used brown sweatshirts so i saved the cuffs off of those!

this one i think i'm most psyched about.  this is a shirt/jacket that ethan wears at the shop in the wintertime.  i made him one last year and he wore holes straight through it.  it's a red and black check flannel that is lined with sweatshirt material.

the shirt is basically exactly the same as his other one except i baste sweatshirt material onto the 5 main pieces (back, 2 fronts, 2 sleeves).  i just used whatever scrap sweatshirts/pants i had because it's on the inside--it just so happens that the inside of one sleeve is black.  i actually attach the 2 pieces together by just serging the edges, that way the pieces stay together really well and you've got all of the edges finished off from the get go.

this next step was a major pat on the back for myself.  on ethan's older lined work shirt he pushed the sleeves up instead of rolling them so i wanted to incorporate a sweatshirt cuff on the new one.   i actually sewed in a sweatshirt cuff into the interior of a faux regular cuff.  i've been thinking about doing this for a while for a jacket that i want to make (and it took me about a half an hour to figure out how to do it), but it worked!

i save all of the buttons that come off of all the shirts for the quilts and whenever i get a naval shirt ethan always claims those buttons for his shirts.

whew!  that's enough making clothes for a while, now it's on to a bunch of embroidery pieces that have been stewing for a while that i've haven't gotten a chance to do yet.