Friday, February 13, 2009

Project 8: Black & Brown Shirts

These are now my favorite shirts ever. They're made from thick, thick linen which I would have never splurged on for myself. Lingoman's mother, however, provided the means as a Solstice gift (gods bless her) so I had to do it! Did that sound convincing?

I intended to try an experiment in mass production by doing all the cutting for both shirts, then all the sewing but I just couldn't. By the time I finished cutting out the pieces for one shirt I was done with that activity. So, I made them sequentially.

The silver-colored Celtic knotwork buttons on the black shirt actually came from my local fabric store, not from a specialty source. Pacific Fabrics rocks.



Lessons learned this time out:

  • Linen is loosely woven and moves but you don't have to panic. If it moves while you're cutting and it's a little off shape it will move just as well while you're pinning and you can fix small errors
  • Sew buttons on by hand. You don't save much time by using the machine and they're never quite as solid.
  • Spend a few extra bucks for the nicer fabric. If you're going to spend all those hours cutting and sewing it's worth it.
  • My six-year-old 1 megapixel digital camera sucks.

1 comment:

CzaMama said...

Beautiful job! You know, in all my years of sewing did I know you could even use a machine to sew on the buttons (besides the industrial machines)...I guess I'm oldschool. ;-)

Again, very nice.