Groovy

A friend thrifted a big bold piece of PeterMax-inspired fabric, and later surprised me with it.

The selvedge says Peter Pan Fabrics, but, given that Peter Pan Fabrics was around from the 1940s to the early 2000s and pretty much never changed the way they put their name in their (unlicensed print) selvedges, I am genuinely unsure if the fabric really is from the late 1960s/early 1970s, or if it's from the late 1990s revival of that groovy era aesthetic.

Either way, it's vintage, right?

After receiving the surprise package containing this fabric, I pretty quickly thought it would be a lot of fun to make it into a button up dress shirt.

I did not so quickly get around to making it, but, now I have.

 

It could never have been anything but ridiculous.

The fabric is fairly nice, seemingly an all-cotton sateen (although I haven't done a burn test.)  Although it may be a bit heavy for this application, it was still lovely to work with. 

I cut the center front along a fold, so that the print elements would not have a chance to land in that "repeating on each side of the seam/opening" look that I dislike in my own work, no matter how common it is in mass produced clothes and sewing envelope photographs.  If it doesn't bother other people it shouldn't bother me, I know I know, but here we are anyway.  By cutting the center front along the fold, I get half of the print on each side of the opening, but in a way that doesn't go so far in the other direction and demand print matching.  It is, for me, an acceptable compromise.

The elements of this print are so large, and include so many similarly-drawn motifs, that a certain amount of seeming repeats and somewhat near repeats was unavoidable.  Which is fine!  Just...not right on either side of a seam, please.

 

And the fact that the yoke, collar, and cuffs were cut cross grain throws more of the "repeat but not quite" into the mix.  I accept this. (The collar band is also cross grain, but it's not clearly visible.)

I used McCall's 6613 (reissued as Butterick 6841) again—it had been a while since I last made it (February!), and that version has short sleeves, so it had been even longer since I'd made a long sleeve version (September!), and my recall for the steps I'd looked up to make the two part mock tower plackets...wasn't so good.  I had left a link in one of my posts here to the tutorial I'd used, so I looked that up and found that the linked website no longer existed.  I poked around some more and found this https://off-the-cuff-shirtmaking.blogspot.com/ which is not precisely like what I'd been doing, but is close enough to show me the parts I'd forgotten.

The pattern originally has the sleeves made in two parts, but not as two part sleeves as much as just to give a nice seam to leave open near the cuff, with folded back and stitched seam allowances.  I know there are a lot of tutorials out there on how to draft the pattern for a traditional tower placket, as well as install it, but I do like how this two piece version allows me to use smaller pieces of fabric.

 

I did get confused with them, and ended up sewing them with the print direction upside-down, but I don't think that's exactly obvious. 

 

We're currently entering a stretch of weather where we're going to have heat advisories nearly every day, so I won;t be wearing this anytime soon, but I doubt I'll forget about it in the meantime.