Further dealings with fit + YOUR favorite fit resources!

I spent a lot of time yesterday measuring shirt yokes.   Following David Coffin's instructions for fitting the back of a shirt with a drape method, I cut a yoke from a shirt pattern whose yoke fit best -- in this case it was the TNT Butterick 4712 pattern -- pinned it to a tee shirt, and then attached (draped) a large rectangle of fabric from this, marking the ends of the yoke on the fabric, and then matching these edges to the pattern and tracing in the sides as drafted -- does that makes sense? I'm in of a bit of a rush this morning.



Of course, I just ended up with the exact same back piece that I would if I'd followed the pattern directly and why wasn't this obvious to me earlier?  The problem isn't the width at the shoulder.  It's the fullness that remains where my back narrows below (that's the back piece on the dress form below, not on me, btw).



Now I'm thinking, if I want a narrower back piece, I should just cut 1/2 inch off the sides of either end, below the armscye.  There's a bit about this in my Singer book, The Perfect Fit.  I'll explore this further later to today.  I don't think darts are what I want.  David Coffin thinks that darts are "merely evidence of ill-cut side seams" (p. 21)  Hmm....

I measured the yokes of all my shirt patterns for the first time.  For my shoulders, the yoke shouldn't be more than 17 inches from shoulder to shoulder, a little under is even better.



But many of my patterns have yokes wider than that; I'd never even thought about it before.







I even took a peek at Negroni....whoa.





Willy didn't know what to make of all this.



Some of you have suggested that perhaps I am at high risk of overfitting.  Possibly but I don't think I'm at that stage yet though I'll admit it's a slippery slope.

Wise readers and sewists of differing skill levels, what are your favorite resources regarding fit?  Along with too many encyclopedic sewing guides, I have the aforementioned Singer The Perfect Fit and yesterday ordered an old edition of Fit for Real People on Amazon, though it doesn't specifically address men's bodies.  A shoulder is a shoulder, right?  And I'm a real person, sort of.

Anyway, I'd love to hear what resources you have been using successfully and what you'd recommend for others.  David Coffin's book is helpful when it comes to men's shirts but it left me with a few unanswered questions.  I'll bring these with me to my session next Tuesday morning with Celebrity Sewing Guru.  I can hardly wait.

Any must have resources out there?  I know Fit for Real People has a lot of enthusiastic support.  Are people really doing those pattern pin-fits?  Are they easier than making a muslin and transferring the changes back onto the pattern?

Some of you have been dealing with this for decades.  I want to hear from you!

Have a great day everybody!

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How should a man's shirt fit? Peter's 20-shirt challenge!

Quick -- name those celebrity lats!

Friends, with less than one week before our Men's Shirt Sew-Along formally begins, I've been doing a lot of thinking and re-thinking about shirts.  We already have more than 100 Sew-Along participants, with numbers climbing daily, many using the Colette Negroni pattern and many using shirt patterns of their own choosing.  The shirt button numbers alone are staggering.

The construction details we're going to be addressing are relatively straightforward: flat-felled seams, rolled hems, sleeve plackets, collar stand and collar, etc.  The fabric you'll be working with is of your own choosing, and I can see from our Flickr group that they range from traditional stripe to Sixties acid trip.

Yesterday I took some time to closely investigate my own shirt collection, a mix of ready-to-wear shirts I've accumulated over the years, and my own creations crafted from vintage shirt patterns.

I also spent a few hours re-reading David Page Coffin's take on fitting a shirt and self-drafting a pattern from his classic book, Shirtmaking, which I know many of you are familiar with.





I want accurate fitting to be a focus of our Sew-Along and I think you do too.  I put on my thinking cap and have decided to invite a professional into our Sew-Along project!  Starting on the very first day of our Sew-Along I will be working privately with -- I can't mention his name yet, but you know it.  And what I learn I will be sharing with you here and in our Flickr group as we work on fitting our muslins and our final shirts.  You can get by with pinked seam allowances and bargain basement fabric, but if the shirt doesn't fit it's going to be obvious to everyone.

Fit has to be a sewist's biggest challenge.  It's also one that I have managed to avoid on my upper half, having convinced myself that I can wear a shirt made straight from a commercial pattern.  The truth is that I can get away with wearing a shirt made straight from a pattern.  The fit, however, is never ideal.

I've examined and recorded the fit of twenty shirts and I can tell you with confidence that none fits perfectly.  Some are closer than others of course, but there's work to do.

Most are decent, especially in front, where I have fewer fit issues.



 

Others, well....  off to the thrift store they go!



If you have the time and the inclination to pore through more than 100 pics of me in 20 different shirts, you can see them all here.   Strong coffee and a comfortable chair are recommended.

I kid you not when I say that before I started sewing, I gave the fit of this Brooks Brothers's shirt nary a second thought.  It was just the way things were.



Things have gotten better now that I make my own shirts, but there is tweaking to be done and I am ready to tweak.



Friends, we are going to do this together and we will have expert help.  Life is too short to stumble in semi-darkness.

Sew-Alongers and Sew-Along fence sitters, your assignment this week is to take a close look at the fit of either your own men's shirt (if you're male), or the shirt of the person you'll be sewing for (if you're female), preferably on the person himself.  Everybody else, do what makes sense.  With regards to fit, what works for you (and him) and what doesn't?  What looks too loose, what looks too tight?

If you can, upload a pic or two to the Flickr group page, so we can see what the perceived problems are.  We are shame-free here at MPB, rest assured.

And now, I've much to do -- including contending once again with this.



Will it never end?

Have a great day everybody.  How are those men's shirt fitting?  What are the challenges?  Share!

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Giveaway winners and SO MUCH MORE!

Readers, it seems this McCall's 1954 sport shirt really struck a nerve with you yesterday.  Sadly, the only recourse is a root canal.  Please make an appointment with my secretary on your way out.

This shirt has proven as polarizing as Bristol Palin on Dancing With the Stars, or for those of my generation, new Chris on The Partridge Family.  Love, hate, and everything in between.  So let's move on -- quickly.

It's snowing hard again today but luckily I managed to get to the fabric store yesterday just in time.  (Unlike Meg of Shop the Garment District, who simply couldn't bear the cold to walk three blocks from her office during her lunch hour.)

Here's my take, a Liberty-esque cotton from Metro Textiles that will make a beautiful shirt for....Michael. 





He is so difficult to buy fabric for because he literally has a wallet-sized Color Me Beautiful color chart I have to carry with me when I shop for him, and if the teal isn't the teal he thinks it isn't right for him.  It's annoying.  Anyway, this pattern is enough of a blur that it works and what's more, he likes it.

In other news...do you ever make one of those What was I thinking purchases on eBay (or elsewhere) and literally, two seconds after clicking "Commit to Buy" you're wondering what possessed you?  That happened to me late last week and the result arrived in the mail yesterday.

Brace yourself.



It may be time for a clutter intervention.

But I also received something I am excited about.  I'm not really a silk-screened tee shirt type, but I saw this on Etsy and had to have it.  It's an organic American Apparel tee and the printing is done with water-based inks.





The Etsy store is called Elemental Shop out of Oregon.  Less than $20 with shipping.  I think we all need one.

(AFTERNOON UPDATE: The lovely people at Elemental are offering MPB readers a 20% discount on anything from their online store.  Just enter the coupon code MPB20.  Thanks, guys!)

Oh, before I forget -- our Vogue pattern winners.  First, the winner of the Dior Paris Original.  I am happy to announce that for the first time ever, we have an Aussie in the mix. 

She's a Sagittarius who makes her own paper (for sale in her Etsy store, The Forty Acre Wood), join me in congratulating SARAH! 

Next, the winner of the Vogue 1947 reproduction:

A curly-headed brunette with a killer recipe for potato chip cookies on her blog, Chicken Marie, please give a big hand to JANNA (aka Jannamo)!  

Sarah and Janna, please email me your addresses (peterlappinnyc at gmail dot com) and I will send your patterns off to you ASAP.

Friends, we're nearly out of time.  So many of you have expressed concern about my poor cousin, whose life has been reduced to something out of that Lady Gaga / Beyonce Telephone video with much dumpier outfits.

Please rest assured that Cathy will be sprung from the clink shortly, a sadder but wiser girl.



Folks, that's it

Sew-Alongers, we're one week away from our starting date so make sure there's plenty of wood in the woodpile and cookies in the fridge...we're gonna need 'em!  Do you have your fabric, your pattern... a sewing machine?

Happy Tuesday, everybody!

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Peter models the McCall's 1954 Men's Sport Shirt!

Friends, thank you so much for your warm and witty comments yesterday in celebration of baby's first birthday here at Male Pattern Boldness.  As you can imagine, after this weekend the house is a mess and I'm emotionally spent.  This has nothing to do with the festivities, mind you, I just completed another men's shirt sewing project!

You may recall my mentioning McCall's 3087 last week almost in passing.  We've all been so focused on our upcoming Men's Shirt Sew-Along (which I am excited to announce already has 100 participants, and latecomers wishing to purchase the Colette Negroni pattern and enjoy our 20% discount have until the end of January to do so -- details here.) you might have thought I'd stopped sewing.

McCall's 3087 is a vintage men's sport shirt from the halcyon Eisenhower years of McCarthy hearings, Cold War, and Seven Brides for Seven Brothers -- 1954 to be exact.



As many of you have already pointed out, there's a bit of a mystery to this pullover sport shirt -- how does one actually get into it?  Friends, the secret is contained in this little pattern piece.  Can you figure it out?



Sewing McCall's 3087 was a fascinating process as its construction is different from anything I had sewn before, but the instructions were straight forward.  The only truly dramatic moment was one I alluded to yesterday: my spurting a puddle of Fray Check all over the upper right shirt front as I reinforced a buttonhole.  Believe me when I say the word uttered in my panic was straight from the school yard and it wasn't Ring-a-levio!

This was one of those thank heaven for the Internet moments: I immediately googled How to remove fray check and was led to the Dritz Fray Check information page, containing detailed instructions on its removal, involving a long soak in alcohol.  And it worked, for me and the shirt.

My fashion fabric was a loosely woven, lightweight, pale gray flannel and I decided -- perhaps inspired by the construction of the RTW Western shirt we examined on Saturday -- to simply serge my seam allowances and skip the more painstaking flat-felled seams.

On the armscye I stitched the allowances down (toward the torso of course) to create a flat-felled look from the outside.  Can you tell the difference?





I sewed my first continuous lap on a shirt sleeve -- trickier than a placket, imo -- with decent results. We'll talk more about those during the Sew-Along.



The front is what makes this shirt special.  You secure the neckline with two buttons just below the collar and those buttons must be correctly positioned.  I had to sew mine on six times.





I am pleased with the result, which brings to mind Perry Como at his mellowest and Bing Crosby at his Minute Maid-iest.

The finished shirt.  I really need some new props.







If I were doing this again -- and I know someone is making this for the Sew-Along so listen up -- I would use a gingham or stripe or perhaps a somewhat heavier flannel.  It really is a sport shirt, so the sportier the better!

The fit is roomy as one would expect from a shirt like this, and I made no alterations.  But I could easily have taken 2" out of the chest, which is a size 36.  You could wear it as an overshirt or tunic.



More pics of the shirt construction and results here.

So what do you think -- yea or nay on this 1954 classic?  I'm on the fence.  Too costume-y?  Too...something?  Be honest.

In closing, Sew-Alongers, don't forget to post pics of your fabric and patterns (if different from Negroni) on our Sew-Along Flickr page.

And you all still have till midnight tonight (EST) to enter yesterday's Vogue Patterns giveaway so don't delay.

Happy Monday, everybody!

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MPB Birthday Extravaganza + Vogue Pattern GIVEAWAYS!

Friends, I almost can't believe it.  On this, National Pie Day, Male Pattern Boldness celebrates its first birthday.  One whole year!

And what a year it's been.  We've been through so much together: weddings, high school reunions, harem pants, fabric shopping, illness, insomnia -- events that have only brought us closer.   You know so much about my life and yet I know so little about yours.  Alas, that's the price I must pay.

So many friends who have been such a big part of MPB from the beginning have sent me their good wishes.

Mamie.



Troy.



Bendable leg Francie.

And the entire cast of One Day at a Time.



The list goes on and on.  As I write this I am staring at a sumptuous bouquet of day lilies from Connie Stevens as well as an invitation to try her new Forever Spring men's skincare line.

I received an especially nice phone message from my cousin Cathy, who is still serving her sentence at a minimum security womens prison outside of Springfield, MA.  Happy for me and could I send her recent issues of In Touch and Real Simple.

We have not one, but two special giveaways in honor of this very special day -- both Vogue patterns!

The first is this extraordinary Christian Dior Vogue Paris Original in a Size 12 (bust 34")  It's complete and uncut and in great shape.  C'est magnifique!



The second is a pristine vintage reissue, a gorgeous 1947 Forties frock that can be either cocktail dress or evening gown and we should all have a closet full of both.  This is a contemporary Size 14 (bust 36").  Tres chic!



All MPB Followers are eligible the world over, and all you have to do to enter is leave a comment below saying which pattern your prefer, the Dior or the 1947 reissue. 

Of course, if you want to add how Male Pattern Boldness has changed your life, please do.  Please keep your comments family friendly however.

You have till Monday, January 24th at midnight EST, and the winners will be chosen at random and announced on Tuesday.

I'll be busy most of today putting the finishing touches on McCalls 3087, my vintage 1954 men's shirt, which is coming along nicely.  Just spilled Fray Check all over your garment?  Soak it in alcohol for 1/2 hour.  It works!



In closing friends, thank you for a fabulous, fun-filled first year -- I wouldn't be here without you!

In honor of our birthday and National Pie Day, I invite all of you to please have a slice on me.



Have a great day everybody and don't forget to enter the giveaway!

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