Stew Shirt

 Many years ago, I had a 1960s "party idea" book that my friends and I enjoyed because it was mostly, to late 1990s eyes, really terrible.  The idea that I liked the most was called a stew--you'd get every holiday decoration you had and put them all out at once and combine the refreshment and activity ideas of all the holidays as well.

Not being a party kind of person, I never got anywhere near throwing such a party, but this shirt I just made for the kiddo...well...

you can maybe see why I was thinking of that party idea.

I had wanted for a while to make some random clothes for the kiddo, but the idea of random I had was a little more...normal.  A sweatshirt or two made from a single fabric + ribbing each.  Then I got into my knit stash, which is a very small part of my overall cloth stash, and realized that I didn't have a lot of large enough yardage to make a wide variety of shirts, but I could definitely use smaller bits to make a variety shirt.

(I will back up and say that, since he likes purple, and mauve is purple-ish, I offered to make him something from the cloth that ended up in the knit moto jacket, because he said it wasn't purple enough.)

Most of the decisions on what fabric to use where were made out of necessity, although that green inset on the front was done for no reason other than I thought it would look good

I used the largest bit of the green I had left after assembling everything else, squared it up, overlaid it on the Halloween cats print, used straight pins to trace the edge, then removed it and eyeballed cutting inside the straight pins by roughly a quarter inch to create a seam allowance

And of course I top stitched.

The contrasts on the waistband and cuff ribbing was done out of necessity, though, since I forgot that the pattern (Kwik•Sew 1650, size 14) expects a lot of stretch from the ribbing to be able to use the pieces as given to match up with the sleeve and waist circumferences.  Fortunately,  had the bit cut out of the Halloween kitties to inset the green square to use on the waistband, and plenty of green left to use on the cuffs.

I restrained my top stitching around the neckline

(there are colors in the knit stripe that match some of the colors in the Halloween kitty print, and that's enough for me)

The back layout was still 100% necessity, cut last from what I had left

I took this picture to show the top stitching alignments on the shoulder, but it also shows how I like to place the seam of the neckline ribbing just past the left shoulder seam, which is something I saw on a readymade t-shirt once that made perfect sense to me.

I had told The Child that I was making a horrible shirt for him, and, when I finally revealed it, he cackled and said "Yesssssssss" and wore it the next day.  We'll see how many years he can get out of it before he gets too gangly again (he officially grew three inches from his eleventh to twelfth birthday...which...may be part of why I'm sewing quick knit things for him right now, instead of more involved woven things...)