Fauxaloha

Another shirt for the kiddo--not quite as straightforward this time, because I had slightly limited yardage...because I made a shirt for him from the same fabric about twelve years ago

Then:

Now:

When I bought the print fabric in Kona in late 2000, I definitely had no idea what its future would be.  I probably had no idea I'd be decent at pattern matching by 2012, and I guarantee I didn't know I'd genuinely enjoy making buttoned shirts with front bands and standing collars and back yokes by 2024 (not to mention the whole "get divorced, get married again, have a kid" aspect)

General construction of this kind of shirt (McCall's 6613 again) goes pretty easily for me now, with the biggest challenges usually coming from trying to squeeze the shirt out of limited yardage.  Fortunately, I like contrast fabric details anyway!

The solid green fabric is not a perfect match for the darkest green in the print, but the amount of fabric I had left meant that most of that dark green would end up on the center back, so not too close to the solid.

(And I added the pocket entirely to have another spot of that fabric somewhere.)

I absolutely could not finagle the sleeves out of the print, and was originally planning to leave them plain green...then...I had a thought...

I used fusible webbing to attach bands of trimmed floral stripes to the sleeves, then zigzagged around the edges.

I still had to finagle things just a bit--one of the strips of flower strip was not quite as long as it really needed to be to fit all the way across the sleeve. As you can see here, it was really close though!

It's another one of those "No-one should get close enough to see.  Ever." things.

I will say, I'm not sure how comfortable the sleeves will be, since the layers of fabric and fusible web are a bit stiff.  It might get soft with washing.

And do you know what I did do out of the ordinary with this shirt? I hand-sewed the buttons.  I do like the idea of machine sewing the buttons, but I always end up taking a lot of time to go back and wrap the thread shanks and individually knot all of them, so...not really saving much time...  Either I'm going to end up hand sewing buttons all the time, or I'm going to learn to trust the machine stitching without going back and wrapping the thread shanks and hand-knotting the thread tails.  FrayCheck may still get involved.

And the back, with the one line of dark green flowers.  It doesn't match the solid on the sleeves, but it's all casual, so it's fine.