Men's shirt

Finally got around to writing this post about my unselfish sewing project and my first ever attempt at making a shirt!

This project came about because I saw this lovely fabric on Leicester market, it's a really soft cotton shirting that is apparently Paul Smith fabric. It is certainly really nice to work with and, I am told, to wear. I looked around for a good pattern to sew a shirt for my husband in said fabric and decided upon the Negroni shirt by Colette patterns. 

After some fun measuring up I set out to cut out the pieces.

First challenge - my fabric has stripes on it so off to the wardrobe to fish out a shirt to examine stripe directions on cuffs, collars, yoke etc. Only had to recut the cuffs due to a silly mistake in laying out the pieces.

Stripes across on collar

Stripes across yoke

Stripes down on body

Sleeve placket and cuff!

The pattern was, like other Colette patterns, relatively easy to follow. I took my time and followed each step of the process to achieve a really neat finish. I also kept hold of the RTW shirt to keep checking positioning and what top stitching to do. There were a lot of firsts in this pattern which kept it very interesting, putting the sleeve placket in took a lot of thinking and attaching the inner yoke required some folding and re-folding although the diagrams in the booklet were pretty helpful. There is also a really good blog post by Jamie at Male Devon Sewing about making shirts - thanks!! I really like the finish of flat-fell seams too which I hadn't tried before.

First trying on - with weird hair!

The shirt has come out waaaay better than I expected for a first attempt and I will definitely be attempting another. 

The Negroni itself is a little bit more of a relaxed shirt than I was after and I did make a couple of modifications. Including topstitching the button bands to make a faux button stand - the shirt has a front facing instead. I also did some extra topstitching along the neckline and next time I would like to try adding a collar stand.

David seams pretty pleased with the finish - shame I couldn't get a good picture of him wearing it, I will keep trying.