I had a few yards of a dark green cotton that I thought would make a good basic button up shirt, but I had a lot of other shirts I'd rather have made first.
Until I decided to make the vest and skirt in the previous two posts. At that point, I thought it would be very funny to go ahead and make that shirt as a coordinate for those two items, and in the spirit of "Is this something I would have worn in high school in 1990, or is it modern Dark Academia?"
Although I do grant that the feed sack-style cat print quilting cotton I used inside the yoke and collar band shift the answer to that to "no" for both aspects.
Well, no, I might have worn it in high school still, but I don't remember ever seeing a shirt with contrasts like this. Also, so so many of my button-up shirts in high school had a placket concealing the buttons and bearing geometric embroidery. So many.
This shirt is made with McCall's 6613, and this time I remembered to shorten the body and sleeves.
Maybe I'll remember to trim out more of the seam allowance bulk on the collar band where the buttonhole goes in the future, too--on some previous iterations of this shirt, I gave up even trying to get that top button buttoned, because the layers were just too thick. This isn't a problem, because the shirts will very likely be worn open at the neck. However, this shirt's job, as a nod to my erstwhile high school style, means that at some point I probably will wear it with a neck tie.
I did not have any perfectly matching green buttons; if I had had better matching thread I would probably have gone with faux horn buttons. I decided to lean into the variety of greens, and also nod to the contrast print, with these pale green buttons. I had only seven, so there aren't quite as many on the front or cuffs as I would have ideally liked. That did have the advantage of the whole button process going faster than it otherwise would have.
The yoke was made with the burrito method. I will happily contort a project if it means no (or at least 'less') hand sewing.
I thought of doing the menswear sleeve method shared by Male Pattern Boldness
years ago, but, by the time I got to attaching the sleeves, I didn't
want to deal with pressing and trimming all those curves, so I set the
sleeves as given. I did, however, bring out the ham and actually press the armscye sleeve seams. Weird, I know.
I also dug out the sleeve board and pressed those under-arm seams properly for once, too.
I wanted to try making false tower plackets, very roughly following this tutorial: https://www.sewmaris.com/tutorials/tutorial-how-to-easily-make-a-kick-ass-sleeve-placket. Very roughly.
Yes, I sewed these before attaching the sleeves to the body. In addition to "avoid hand sewing whenever possible," I also strongly subscribe to "sew things flat, before they're attached to other bigger pieces, whenever possible."
As slap-dash as my process was, I'm very happy with how they turned out and hope I only get better at them in the future.
(I did make a single sample of the process when I first encountered it...about two months ago. I remained confident.)
I used the black thread in my serger--I do have dark green serger thread, but I was already planning to switch my serger to white thread after finishing this project, so I did not want to change serger thread that quickly. Black works fine.
This pattern wants you to invert the back box pleat, but I didn't want to do that.
Someday I might try adding a locker loop back there, too. Just for fun.
I cut this shirt out in one evening, then sewed it completely the next day. It was nice not to have to concern myself with making sure that print elements wouldn't repeat to closely on either side of the front opening, and I didn't have any mix-ups at all where I accidentally applied facing or pressed things into identical shapes instead of mirror images. I'll eventually get around to making the other solid color shirts I thought I would have made before using the green cloth.
Not that I lack for other projects!
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