A big shirt for a little boy

This is the first time I've used McCall's 9240 to make a shirt for the kiddo.

I managed to just barely squeeze the pieces (with nap) out of the one yard length of cloth he picked out when I went through a period of making shirts for him three years ago.  He's...a bit larger now than he was then.  Turns out, though, that this pattern makes a really long shirt (which is obvious, looking at the pattern envelope photo now), so there won't be any problems with, say, shaving length off of each body piece in future iterations, if needed.

I used a stripe print for this first version

because, since it was such a tight squeeze, there wasn't a lot of room for pattern matching across the front opening.  (I'm usually excessively concerned about pattern matching because something that, to me, is a huge giveaway for a home-made item is when the pattern repeats or almost matches on either side of a prominent seam or placket.  I like to avoid that.)

And I finally tried the method for attaching menswear-style sleeves as illustrated on the Male Pattern Boldness blog last year.

I'm very happy to have seen this method, because I like to TOPSTITCH EVERYTHING, but attempting to topstitch sleeves sewn in the way I'm used to always resulted in a rumpled mess.  I also got ambitious and flat felled the side seams.  (Don't look inside.  I haven't sewn a flat felled seam for...um...20 years, so I'm more than a little out of practice...)  And I found fantastically neutral-but-yellow buttons to use...then discovered that I don't have a ¾" template for my buttonholer, so made the holes probably larger than they should be, instead of, y'know, picking out smaller buttons.  And then I remembered why I prefer two-hole buttons.

BUT THAT'S ALL OK BECAUSE I FINISHED IT AND I'LL KNOW WHAT TO BE CAREFUL OF ON THE NEXT SHIRT MADE WITH THIS PATTERN and as soon as I showed it to the kiddo he stripped of the shirt he was wearing to put this on. *thumbs up*