Salvaged Fruit Shirt

 OK, the shirt I posted yesterday and its horrible awful unforgivable print repeat: I fixed it.

I went with cutting the fabric on the bias, because that was the least hassle in regard to trying to avoid another close print repeat--I mean, yeah, there are still close print repeats, but they're angled so it doesn't count isn't so annoyingly obvious.

I did hesitate about cutting on the bias, because this is essentially an extremely unbalanced plaid, so I knew the angled part wouldn't have the look of a nice even series of diamonds.  I am amused that the very bottom of the band is not only set nicely on point, but the fruit inside is angled so that it's upright.  I barely had enough fabric left to cut this piece on the bias, so that was a nice surprise.

When removing the original band, I chose the path of least resistance and cut around the buttonholes within the seam allowance, instead of picking out all of the buttonhole stitching.  I opened up the collar stand enough to remove the front band--I absolutely did not want to remove the stitching on the collar stand buttonhole, so I cut the band as close to the buttonhole as I could, inside the (opened up) collar stand.  When I sewed on the replacement band, I had just that little bit of fabric to tuck into the collar stand before I sewed it back down.  This left me worried that the little nub of fabric now in there might be so short that it could work loose with laundering, so I ran another line of stitching, across the front band, in the ditch under the collar stand.  Then I did another line of stitching a few millimeters above the edge stitching that I used to close the collar band back up.  We'll see how it goes.

And I am absolutely not worrying about the not-bias-cut left side band visible when the shirt is not buttoned all the way.  I'm done with this.  Done.