I made Nathan a T-shirt! Ok, so I have made t-shirts before, so you may ask….what is the big deal?

This time I didn’t start off with a pattern. Instead, I started off with a little bit of knowledge acquired from the pattern making course I did in July and instructions for a basic, close-fitting t-shirt from Winifred Aldrich’s book ‘metric pattern making for children’s wear and babywear’.

I made a few little adjustments to the pattern after following the instructions, and I probably have a couple more to do before I am completely happy. I made the t-shirt out of 100% cotton jersey (fabric made in Australia). I generally make Nathan’s t-shirts out of stretchy jersey (cotton with 10% lycra) so they will be as comfortable as possible, but this time I wanted to see how the garment would fit without the stretch (stretchy fabrics are more forgiving with respect to fit). I was a little concerned that the neck opening would be too small, even though I made it bigger than instructed, but it fits over Nathan’s big head without a problem. I was nervous about drafting a sleeve even with instructions, but I really like how the sleeves turned out (and I even made a slight adjustment to the curve).

All-in-all, I am really happy with the t-shirt, and I have just a little more confidence that I will be able to come up with some clothing patterns for Wispy Threads. Most packaged patterns cannot be used for commercial purposes and, anyway, I wanted to have a go at making the pattern as well as the clothing.

The instructions in the book look like this.

A little bit of ribbon to make a plain t-shirt slightly more interesting

I’m slowly getter better at using the Coverstitch machine

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 31st, 2011 at 12:35 pm and is filed under Sewing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.