Shirts For The Men In Your Life

Men love custom made clothes, too!  Kasey's husband is the lucky recipient of 3 great new shirts.  Be sure to take a close up look of  the custom embroidery she did.  You can follow Kasey and all of her embroidery work at Kasey Sasser Embroidery and Gifts.

Here are three more shirts made with lovely fabrics from Sew Much Fabric. Two are made with the Egyptian cotton sateen (French Blue and Venetian Red), the third with the Copen Blue Stretch Cotton Shirting. These are really great fabrics for classic tailored shirts. I used Kwik Sew 3422 for these; Kwik Sew 3555 would also be a good choice. Remember to widen your seam allowances to 5/8 from 1/4 if you’ll be doing traditional flat-felling and topstitching.

The Egyptian sateen is light, almost batiste-weight, excellent for summer shirts or dresses, but still good to carry you into fall layered with a light jacket or sweater. The cotton fabric is crisp, irons well and sews beautifully – no difficulties with it. A few tips on sewing with sateen: if you are as “particular” as I am, you will want to treat it as a directional fabric. I cut one of the pockets 90 degrees to the shirt front and while it’s not bad, I notice the difference in shine. So keep that in mind when cutting. On the plus side it is a generous 56” wide so you can buy a little bit less if you are creative with the layout. I would use a pressing cloth or iron from the wrong side to avoid shine, but I was able to remove any shine I ironed in with a light spritzing from the water bottle, no permanent damage. I pre-washed the fabrics in hot water and dried on medium in the dryer, they came out just fine. I anticipate they will wash and wear just as easily.

Copen Blue Stretch Cotton Shirting (Sold Out) is very elastic, but for a stretch woven is has very good recovery. If you want to make a very slim fitting tailored shirt or dress this is the fabric to do it in. It sews fairly well; it is marginally thick so lengthen your stitches just a bit – I used 2.8 instead of 2.4 – to keep the fabric from bunching strangely at the seams (stretch wovens just do this, it's the Lycra I think.) It irons wonderfully; the seams are crisp, and, even when I left the iron on too long, almost no shine. But when it did happen it came right out with water. When topstitching this one I again lengthened the stitch – 3.3 instead of 3.0 – but if you’re going to flat-fell the seams as I do, you may want to pin and press them first; the elasticity lets it pop out from under the presser foot on hard curves. I washed and dried this fabric the same as the first shirting and it too came out just fine.

Also, try to handle the cut pieces as little as possible as both fabrics fray easily. Sateen is created with a “half-weave” which allows it to ravel, and the bounce of the Lycra in the second fabric causes it to unwind readily. I strongly recommend either flat-felled, French or serged seams with these fabrics.

If you want to make really lovely tailored shirts I’d like to suggest Pam Howard’s Craftsy class, the Classic Tailored Shirt. No, I don’t get anything for it but I’ve tried every tailored shirt book and class I could find and I think this beats them all. Is it Savile Row tailoring? No, maybe more “modern” classic, but the class is excellent, and Ms. Howard a very good teacher. But whatever method you use, a good way to ensure best results is with great shirting like these from Roz!