Halloween Patchwork Shirt

 Finally finished!  I took the first photo of this project

on October 7.  I finished it on October 27.  That's nearly three weeks.  The lined patchwork blazer I made last year, using a pattern that was entirely new to me, took five days total.  And the first Halloween patchwork project I did was acknowledged as a distraction tactic (and also took five days.)  This year's project did not distract from...potential upcoming events...and in fact that uncertainty is probably what dragged this project out for so long.

But it's done!  And it's cute!

 

 

Part of the delay in finishing this did come from the fact that I made an entire other shirt, to test the alterations I made to my tried & true (and already significantly altered) Burda 7831.  At least the alterations made to that were good enough, and I didn't have to spend more time (or make another shirt) to work out anything too annoying.

Once I got through the patchwork construction, the assembly was mostly straightforward.  I had to pick out and re-stitch a few areas where I sewed the collar stand to the neckline, because I still haven't convinced myself that I should sew that with the shirt up--that feels like I'm risking accidentally sewing the other side of the collar stand to the seam, but, functionally, it means there are usually areas of the neckline that get bunched and folded and sewn down like that, so I have to pick those apart and re-sew to get them flat.

And then I had an issue with sewing on the first sleeve, which also wanted to bunch and fold and have to be finessed and re-stitched into being smooth.  I did get it worked out and serged, and was a bit disappointed that all the planning I'd done (to try to make sure that none of the prints ended up too close to themselves, across the sleeve to the bodice, and also that the patchwork seams would at least somewhat align) was for naught, because prints repeated and seams missed each other severely.  I grumbled and said it was fine because I just wanted to be done.

Then I went to pin the other sleeve and realized I'd managed to completely space out my observation of the notches and had, in fact, just sewn the wrong sleeve to the wrong side.

That was not fine.

I very very unhappily picked out the serging and the stitching, trying to leave enough cut stitch threads in place that I could use them as a reference for where the stitch line was, since the serged edges were no longer the full 5/8" width, but they were going to be sewn to pieces that were still 5/8"...and I had serged it so fast that the depth of the new cut edges were extremely irregular, so I couldn't cut down the untouched edges to match.

 But! I persevered! And it all worked out like I had originally planned!

I did think to check that the shoulder seams were the same width after sewing the irregular sleeve situation, and had to pick out stitches to make an adjustment there, but that was nothing compared to what I'd already had to do with the sleeves.

I did my usual approach of pressing all the edges before starting assembly, then unrolling them when sewing the side seams and rolling them back up to sew the hems, meaning I didn't have to manhandle the whole shirt around the ironing board and sleeve board

I did shirk my duties somewhat by not trimming the patchwork seam allowances where the hems were pressed, so the stitching is somewhat irregular, but no more than anything else in this project, and no-one's going to look in the course of casual wear.

Since this is not lined, I serged the seam allowances.  I also edge stitched through all layers in some small attempt to help keep the insides neat.  We'll see how it survives being laundered.

This project did provide a nice opportunity to use up a lot of partly filled bobbins.  I chose purple for the top thread, and eventually used in the bobbin once the odds'n'ends ran out, because I had a nearly empty spool and an entire 1km spool of the same color.  I know the Saba C tex 40 thread (purchased from Wawak, unsponsored) is thicker than 'normal' sewing thread, which means a bobbin won't hold as much, but I just love that ever-so-slightly bulkier thread so much that I put up with the need for slightly more frequent bobbin refills.

I did consider using a different color button in each patch, but I had the exact amount of these ghostly splotchy white buttons, and, since I almost never pick out buttons until it's time to start making buttonholes, the fact that these have two holes (instead of four) meant they would go on faster, and I would be done with this project.

I still have larger yardage of the green madras, the orange-with-cat, and the glitchy purple, so I figured I'd use one of those for the under collar, the collar stand, and for the front bands folded to the inside to reinforce the buttonholes.  I chose the green madras, and forgot to take any specific pictures of any of it, but here you can see the collar band peeking out from under the collar.

Oh, and: see how the center seam on the collar aligns nicely with the center seam on the back?  That was not my plan.  My plan was for the center back to be a strip of patches, and not a seam.  But. Once I got everything sewn together in that configuration, it was about a half inch too narrow on both sides.  That meant my options were to sew another strip on each side, knowing that almost all of it would be hidden in the seam allowances, or choose one side and pick apart some of the top stitching so I could extend the short row--originally intended to land below the armscye--to the shoulder, then add a new short row to that side, and top stitch everything.  I went with the latter.

It was only mildly complicated by continuing to try to keep prints away from themselves, after the original short row had also done that in regard to the prints on the edge of the side front.  Of course, the sizes that things ended up, I could have used the same prints on each side and had them blend together once sewn.  I honestly don't think that would have made the choices of laying things out have gone any easier.

For the record, I laid out the patches for one front side first, then the other, then the sleeves, then the collar, and saved the back for last, always checking against the previously-assembled pieces to see if the fabrics were far enough from each other to make me happy.  My initial inclination was to do front-back-sleeves-collar.  I had a suspicion that would have made picking the sleeve prints extra annoying.  Whether that was true or not, it seemed to have worked well.

This is not the first Halloween print patchwork shirt I've made, but it is the first one I've made in the spirit (heh) of the very first patchwork shirt I was aware of seeing.

It was the year 2000, and the local library had a series of 1970s craft books called The Complete Encyclopedia of Crafts, and those crafts were so very incredibly 1970s™.

But.

One project was a button up shirt made from patchwork, and the assortment of patchwork prints included just struck me as so cool (remember, fashion trends of the late '90s had a significant amount of 1970s mixed in.)  This was also the project that introduced the idea of "only assemble enough patchwork for each piece of the pattern, and this patchwork shape will be irregular," which, from what I've seen from sporadic other people online making clothes from patchwork, is not intuitive for everyone.

I recently poked around online to see if I could find the project again, and I'm 99% sure it's this

(and, also, having the "encyclopedia" volumes be hardback reprints of craft magazines does explain why the topics weren't the least bit in alphabetical order, which was something I had found very odd about them back in 2000.)

I am still very charmed by that shirt, even though...looking at it now, and the way the patchwork rows don't line up with the rows above and below them, and the...the...[ugh] the print repeats from the bodice to sleeve on her left side, I see that perhaps I have been too exacting in my own patchwork.

Not that I'll change or anything.