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which_chickSo I'm on YouTube and I come across Bernadette. She's a youtuber. She youtubes professionally. That is a thing, I suppose, that people do nowadays. As a job. Her area of interest is historical clothing which she discusses and makes and demonstrates and wears and so forth.
Whilst watching Bernadette's YouTubery, I became aware of several points.
Point the first: She's fun to listen to. Great voice, excellent vocabulary, wry sense of humor. If you are actually watching the YouTubery, (I listen to a lot of my YouTubery, watching in bits and pieces, while doing other things) she's easy to watch, too.
Point the second: She is enthusiastic and skilled in her area of interest. I like (as we have seen previously vis a vis WH40K mini painting) watching people do things that they enjoy and are good at. This is ... fun for me and certainly way more fun than observing Kardashians or Real Housewives or whatever. Ymmv, obvs.
Point the third: I am reasonably certain that Bernadette is single-handedly responsible for a nonzero number of people who are now the proud owners of a Bedsheet Pirate Shirt which is probably reasonably accurate in terms of cut, fit, and assembly despite being made of bedsheet instead of actual linen. (Actual linen is like fifteen dollars a yard for non-shitty linen and it is likely NOT something you have on hand just because. Linen yardage is NOT A NORMAL THING PEOPLE HAVE ON HAND. If you have enough white-ish linen fabric in a weight suitable to make a pirate shirt you already sew and may sew historically.)
Bernadette made a video, you see. It's charming. It's not 100% a how-to video and it kind of skips over a lot of the things you actually might need to know in order to know how to sew, but it's pretty CLOSE to a how-to video for making a Pirate Shirt. Truth is, it's just about enough of a how-to video to get people rummaging through their linen closets for a bedsheet that could be turned into a Bedsheet Pirate Shirt, if the comments below the video are anything to judge by.
Okay, so time for some linkage. Here's Bernadette Banner's Youtube Channel. Poke around if you're inclined, but that's the general channel. Here's the pirate shirt video. There's a somewhat clear sheet of diagrams for the pieces that you need. (Cuffs and collar pieces are shown at "folded in half" size. Make them 2x as wide when you cut them out if you are proceeding in that direction, or read the comments on the video to see where else other people have had trouble.)
Bernadette recommends this as a beginner-friendly project. I am not certain it is beginner-friendly, but then what the hell do I know. I don't sew. I can kinda sew, but not like, actual clothing or anything.
In the video, she is like Pirate Shirts For All which is an idea with merit.
Full disclosure here: Bernadette makes her pirate shirt out of real linen with historical practice and yadda yadda yadda. But, if you are watching this video at like nine PM on a school night and immediately want to get to making a pirate shirt because she makes it look like the sort of thing you could possibly do, an Old Bed Sheet in white is likely the most available plain-weave woven cotton that could be sourced for an attempt at a pirate shirt without trekking to the fabric store which is 100% not open at that hour anyway. I expect that's what drove the horde to their linen closets, tbh.
Now, if you've been reading me for any amount of time at all, and I mean, like for a hot minute, you are aware that this is the long, slow windup to the fast break, which is obvious. (For the terminally clueless or new readers, there is an in-progress bedsheet pirate shirt at my house.)
Steps I have taken in this journey have... Let me illustrate this with a simple graphic. Here, we are starting at the little dot on the left and proceeding to the big X (like a pirate treasure map) on the right. Bernadette goes like the black dotted line. I... I took the red route. Most of my life is spent on the red route, honestly. I am a red route sort of person.
With some idea of how meandering and not-forward-progress and circle-back-and-do-over and unpick that and resew it and jeez, you are an idiot there will be in this narrative, let us proceed to see how I went forward (and backward and in circles and whatnot) in my journey towards A Bedsheet Pirate Shirt.
After locating an appropriate bedsheet in my closet, which took mere seconds, I then determined the make and model of my antique Kenmore Sewing Machine. It is a 120.491 Kenmore, which is from the first half of the 1950's. (It was free, is why. I got it, along with some sewing stuff, from my less-preferred grandmother's house when she went to live with her youngest daughter. It has been in my bedroom as the late-afternoon sunshine-y endtable for the cat to sleep on for the last twenty years and two cats.) I bought and downloaded the manual for said sewing machine so that I could learn how to use it. The manual was thirty pages and actually helpful.
I located some thread and a bobbin for the sewing machine (it came with like twenty bobbins) and determined how to wind a bobbin. The manual covers this fairly thoroughly. Bobbins were a thing we did in Home Ec sewing class in 1982. Also my aunt SJ sewed a lot. I know *some* of the theory for sewing machine sewing, which is why I knew what a bobbin was and why I needed one.
I know the bobbin goes under the flip up plate thing. The manual covers that and also threading the machine with the normal spool that goes on top. It also goes over how to pick up the bobbin thread with the hand wheel on the right hand side, another task I vaguely remember from a 1982 class in home ec sewing wherein I made a blue apron.
Side note: wow, my eyes are bad enough now that threading a needle is fucking hard, even with my bifocals that are only like a year old. I think I want a magnifier thing to wear on my face while I'm playing needle threading.
With a bobbin and a spool of thread correctly installed on the machine, I tried sewing with it. NO. Hot mess of extreme snarly fuckery on the bottom of the fabric. Like, horrible snarly. Back to the manual. This is a tension problem. There is a tension adjusting knob. I fiddle with that a bit et voila, beautiful and even stiches happen. It's magical. I sew a tiny bit of fabric together. YES! Sewing machine actually works. Huzzah!
Next I discovered that sewing maching sewing pulls right apart so you have to back up first then go forward then back up again at the end to make things not do that. This was possibly covered in home ec sewing class in 1982 but honestly it's been a long time and I wasn't at all interested in the material (lol) at the time. The sewing machine goes backwards and forwards with a knobby thing on the front right side, as explained in the manual. It's easy.
In the free stuff that came with the sewing machine, I noted a lack of Ways To Mark Fabric, Good Scissors, Seam Ripper, and Cloth Measuring Tape, so I bought those things at WalMart. I did locate needles for hand sewing, with infinitely small eyes that I cannot really see but after much practice can now thread DESPITE not being able to see the eyes. There's a bit of a knack. I also found plain boring straight pins. (My less-preferred grandma was not a woman who would spend money on fancy colored pins if there were cheaper plain ones to be had.)
Using my Good Scissors (with handle identified by tape to distinguish it from the Not-As-Good Scissors), I cut pieces for the bedsheet pirate shirt out of bedsheet. I had to recut cuffs, collar pieces because of stupid failure to understand that they were measured AFTER they'd been folded. The other pieces were dimensioned as cut out and the handwritten diagram didn't clarify this. Also I had to recut them anyway because those items actually have to kind of fit. There's a lot of room for error on the sleeve pieces and the body pieces because the shirt is pretty floofy in terms of fit. You could easily lose half an inch of width for seam allowances of 1/4 inch on each edge of the sleeves and the body and it will still be OK, but this is not the case on the cuffs and collar. There was a lot of bedsheet and these were not big pieces, so no lives lost.
With the pieces cut out, I next located my iron. I do own one, though I haven't turned it on since about 2007. (My current day job does not require clothing to be ironed or even particularly stain free.) Apparenty ironing is very important for sewing and hems and shit, at least as near as I could determine from YouTube sewing people. So I located it and found something I could iron on. (I do not own an actual ironing board.) My iron still works, nice! Even makes steam. Fancy.
Okay, so now I had ways to sew and things to sew. I assembled sleeve + gusset sub-assemblies because that looked reasonably easy to do. I sewed them together. The sleeve is a rectangular tube, so hard to mess up, except that you put gusset at the armpit end and don't sew the last like three inches on the NON ARMPIT end (because that's for your cuff opening).
On the big piece, I also cut an initial effort at hole for neck and seamed up sides of body part of shirt to where the gusset/sleeve would hook on.
Next I watched some youtubery on how to gather fabric. The sleeves at the shoulders and cuffs are gathered. The shirt neckline is gathered. There's a lot of gathering to be done for a Pirate Shirt, so I figured I should learn how to do that next. Fully informed about gathering methods, I gathered the sleeve top and pinned the gathered sleeve into body part of shirt where it should go.
I used about twenty pins to pin the gathered sleeve on, so that it would stay put and not let the gathers slip around. Next, I tried on the one sleeve shirt (carefully) to see how it was. The gusset was way too small, like ... hard to move arm and binding. Ugh. I only got poked a few times.
I unpinned the sleeve and picked apart the gussets from both sleeves breaking in my new seam ripper. I cut bigger gussets and installed them on the sleeves. I also had to spread out the shirt sleeve seams a little to fit the larger gussets because I'd seamed them for the smaller gussets that didn't work.
I carefully pinned a new-and-improved sleeve into the shirt, making effort to put the gathers in NICE and make everything look good and stuff. I really worked on this. And, because running sewing machine over gathered fabric seemed terrifying, I sewed in the sleeve by hand over the gathered part, with backstitching as per Bernadette.
This looked great. It was really effective and lovely and I did a great job with neat, tiny backstitching and the gathers looked very even. It would have been even better if I'd managed to keep the sleeve-to-shirt seams ON THE SAME SIDE as the sleeve-to-gusset and sleeve-to-sleeve seams. Oops. Bit of confusion there, so... hello, seam ripper. Allow me to pick out the beautiful, neat, tiny white backstitching that I just spent like two hours doing.
Removing the backstitching so that I could fix the sleeve fuckup took an entire episode of Bridgerton. Methinks that redheaded chonk bint doth protest too much on the "oh, I could never write like Whistledown" front.
I was mad about the sleeve fuckup. And I wanted some actual progress on the shirt front. I needed a win. So, I ironed and then hemmed the splits in the sleeves for where your hand goes through. (Where the cuffs open up when they are unbuttoned. I folded, ironed, folded, ironed, and then whip stitched. They look good and the hems are tiny and cute AND on the fucking inside of the sleeves. I triple-checked before sewing them. They are both done.
That went so well that I did the vertical slits at the neck part of the shirt. Again, tiny fold, iron the hell out of it, tiny fold again, iron the hell out of it, whip stitch tiny. Vertical slit at neck part is now hemmed CORRECTLY with the hem on the inside of the shirt. Huzzah!
Such hemming progress! So I embarked on hemming the bottom of the shirt. Now, this is pretty long and it hangs where it will be tucked into pants or a skirt or something and nobody will ever see the hem. I folded it over, ironed, folded, and ironed again. And then for reasons that escape me, I decided to hem it by hand. The pirate shirt is 42 inches wide of fabric. I am not 42 inches wide, but it's floofy and has a surprising amount of extra fabric in it. The bottom hem of the thing is thus 84 inches of hemming. By hand. With tiny stiches of white-on-white. I am halfway done. Interestingly, my hemming is getting a lot more even and attractive as I chug along with this. Practice. It is a thing. I am getting faster about it, too. But the hem remains about halfway done because I then felt confident enough to proceed with the more complicated stuff.
(There is no actual reason that success on something easy like hemming is going to translate to success on something not-so-easy like, y'know, sleeves or gathers or whatever.)
With the two revised sleeves pinned into the shirt and the neckline gathers installed in a temporary fashion, I tried the shirt on, very carefully. The new gussets look good, but the sleeves hung way too low. I regarded the sleeves a bit, in my bathroom mirror, with the sleeves hanging halfway to my elbows. That's not what Bernadette's shirt looks like. After enough thought that probably smoke was coming out of both my ears, I determined that the issue at hand was that the neck hole was too short side to side.
Yeah, I know. That doesn't sound like a good solution, does it? But it is. Pirate shirts are made so that the extra floofy sleeve material (the sleeve pieces are 20" wide before they're sewn into tubes) gets gathered at the armscye and the cuff. The extra floofy body material (the shirt has a body circumference of 84" and I assure you that I am not now nor have I ever been 84" around) gets gathered into the collar of the shirt. This gathering of the body material crunches it up quite a bit and raises the sleeves in the process.
The big takeaway here is that a pirate shirt is not a very... fitted garment.
The neckline is shaped like a letter T, where the top crossbar is pretty darned long. I did not quite understand this before regarding the shoulders of the shirt hanging halfway to my elbows. So, I cut the top crossbar of the T wider and gathered up more material to raise the shoulders of the shirt. I did this in two stages (... cut - gather - try on, cut - gather - try on) to make sure that I didn't fuck up.
I was somewhat worried about putting gathers into sleeve cuffs and armscyes. The sleeve-into-shirt part seemed easiest because the arm gussets are not gathered and thus can be sewn straight onto the shirt sides, leaving like a half circle shape that is gathered and fitted into the remaining amount of shoulder area. So I did that. It went OK.
Thus far, we have SHIRT WITH SLEEVES. Halfway hemmed. Neck slit edges hemmed. Cuff slit edges hemmed. Gussets attached to sleeves. Sleeves attached to body part of shirt. Neck hole sized correctly, gathers installed for neck opening, fit checked.
For the sleeve cuff ends, it was not obvious to me how it was supposed to work. I finally gave up and drew lines with my fabric pencil for (a) a line to stitch for gathers (b) a line to set in the gathered material THIS FAR BUT NO MORE and (C) Halfway IS HERE on both sleeve and cuff fabric.
After a couple of missteps, I ALSO decided to fold over and iron hems on my collar and cuffpieces so that the cuff and collar would not have awful raw edges exposed. Then I inserted the gathered sleeve end into the cuff, did my best to make the centers line up, mushed around the gathering so that it looked even-ish, pinned it aggressively, and proceeded to backstich the gathered sleeve fabric to the cuff ON THE INSIDE ONLY so that I could do a tiny whip stitch on the outside (visible) cuff to sleeve later. My whip stitching is less godawful than my backstitching.
For the collar, I marked... center back on shirt and collar, shoulder left and shoulder right on the shirt and collar. And I gathered and arranged the available gathers more-or-less evenly for each section and pinned the living hell out of the whole shebang and backstitched it together on the inside. Once I did that, I whipstitched the outside of the collar to the outside of the shirt.
So, now, collar and cuffs are installed. Remaining to be done: reinforcing squares at neck opening and at cuff openings. buttons x 4. button holes x 4. hem remainder of bottom edge.
But yeah, pirate shirt. In progress. And, it seems (lol) that I'm also learning how to make the sewing kind of happen, along the way. There will be pictures once I get it done.
Whilst watching Bernadette's YouTubery, I became aware of several points.
Point the first: She's fun to listen to. Great voice, excellent vocabulary, wry sense of humor. If you are actually watching the YouTubery, (I listen to a lot of my YouTubery, watching in bits and pieces, while doing other things) she's easy to watch, too.
Point the second: She is enthusiastic and skilled in her area of interest. I like (as we have seen previously vis a vis WH40K mini painting) watching people do things that they enjoy and are good at. This is ... fun for me and certainly way more fun than observing Kardashians or Real Housewives or whatever. Ymmv, obvs.
Point the third: I am reasonably certain that Bernadette is single-handedly responsible for a nonzero number of people who are now the proud owners of a Bedsheet Pirate Shirt which is probably reasonably accurate in terms of cut, fit, and assembly despite being made of bedsheet instead of actual linen. (Actual linen is like fifteen dollars a yard for non-shitty linen and it is likely NOT something you have on hand just because. Linen yardage is NOT A NORMAL THING PEOPLE HAVE ON HAND. If you have enough white-ish linen fabric in a weight suitable to make a pirate shirt you already sew and may sew historically.)
Bernadette made a video, you see. It's charming. It's not 100% a how-to video and it kind of skips over a lot of the things you actually might need to know in order to know how to sew, but it's pretty CLOSE to a how-to video for making a Pirate Shirt. Truth is, it's just about enough of a how-to video to get people rummaging through their linen closets for a bedsheet that could be turned into a Bedsheet Pirate Shirt, if the comments below the video are anything to judge by.
Okay, so time for some linkage. Here's Bernadette Banner's Youtube Channel. Poke around if you're inclined, but that's the general channel. Here's the pirate shirt video. There's a somewhat clear sheet of diagrams for the pieces that you need. (Cuffs and collar pieces are shown at "folded in half" size. Make them 2x as wide when you cut them out if you are proceeding in that direction, or read the comments on the video to see where else other people have had trouble.)
Bernadette recommends this as a beginner-friendly project. I am not certain it is beginner-friendly, but then what the hell do I know. I don't sew. I can kinda sew, but not like, actual clothing or anything.
In the video, she is like Pirate Shirts For All which is an idea with merit.
Full disclosure here: Bernadette makes her pirate shirt out of real linen with historical practice and yadda yadda yadda. But, if you are watching this video at like nine PM on a school night and immediately want to get to making a pirate shirt because she makes it look like the sort of thing you could possibly do, an Old Bed Sheet in white is likely the most available plain-weave woven cotton that could be sourced for an attempt at a pirate shirt without trekking to the fabric store which is 100% not open at that hour anyway. I expect that's what drove the horde to their linen closets, tbh.
Now, if you've been reading me for any amount of time at all, and I mean, like for a hot minute, you are aware that this is the long, slow windup to the fast break, which is obvious. (For the terminally clueless or new readers, there is an in-progress bedsheet pirate shirt at my house.)
Steps I have taken in this journey have... Let me illustrate this with a simple graphic. Here, we are starting at the little dot on the left and proceeding to the big X (like a pirate treasure map) on the right. Bernadette goes like the black dotted line. I... I took the red route. Most of my life is spent on the red route, honestly. I am a red route sort of person.
With some idea of how meandering and not-forward-progress and circle-back-and-do-over and unpick that and resew it and jeez, you are an idiot there will be in this narrative, let us proceed to see how I went forward (and backward and in circles and whatnot) in my journey towards A Bedsheet Pirate Shirt.
After locating an appropriate bedsheet in my closet, which took mere seconds, I then determined the make and model of my antique Kenmore Sewing Machine. It is a 120.491 Kenmore, which is from the first half of the 1950's. (It was free, is why. I got it, along with some sewing stuff, from my less-preferred grandmother's house when she went to live with her youngest daughter. It has been in my bedroom as the late-afternoon sunshine-y endtable for the cat to sleep on for the last twenty years and two cats.) I bought and downloaded the manual for said sewing machine so that I could learn how to use it. The manual was thirty pages and actually helpful.
I located some thread and a bobbin for the sewing machine (it came with like twenty bobbins) and determined how to wind a bobbin. The manual covers this fairly thoroughly. Bobbins were a thing we did in Home Ec sewing class in 1982. Also my aunt SJ sewed a lot. I know *some* of the theory for sewing machine sewing, which is why I knew what a bobbin was and why I needed one.
I know the bobbin goes under the flip up plate thing. The manual covers that and also threading the machine with the normal spool that goes on top. It also goes over how to pick up the bobbin thread with the hand wheel on the right hand side, another task I vaguely remember from a 1982 class in home ec sewing wherein I made a blue apron.
Side note: wow, my eyes are bad enough now that threading a needle is fucking hard, even with my bifocals that are only like a year old. I think I want a magnifier thing to wear on my face while I'm playing needle threading.
With a bobbin and a spool of thread correctly installed on the machine, I tried sewing with it. NO. Hot mess of extreme snarly fuckery on the bottom of the fabric. Like, horrible snarly. Back to the manual. This is a tension problem. There is a tension adjusting knob. I fiddle with that a bit et voila, beautiful and even stiches happen. It's magical. I sew a tiny bit of fabric together. YES! Sewing machine actually works. Huzzah!
Next I discovered that sewing maching sewing pulls right apart so you have to back up first then go forward then back up again at the end to make things not do that. This was possibly covered in home ec sewing class in 1982 but honestly it's been a long time and I wasn't at all interested in the material (lol) at the time. The sewing machine goes backwards and forwards with a knobby thing on the front right side, as explained in the manual. It's easy.
In the free stuff that came with the sewing machine, I noted a lack of Ways To Mark Fabric, Good Scissors, Seam Ripper, and Cloth Measuring Tape, so I bought those things at WalMart. I did locate needles for hand sewing, with infinitely small eyes that I cannot really see but after much practice can now thread DESPITE not being able to see the eyes. There's a bit of a knack. I also found plain boring straight pins. (My less-preferred grandma was not a woman who would spend money on fancy colored pins if there were cheaper plain ones to be had.)
Using my Good Scissors (with handle identified by tape to distinguish it from the Not-As-Good Scissors), I cut pieces for the bedsheet pirate shirt out of bedsheet. I had to recut cuffs, collar pieces because of stupid failure to understand that they were measured AFTER they'd been folded. The other pieces were dimensioned as cut out and the handwritten diagram didn't clarify this. Also I had to recut them anyway because those items actually have to kind of fit. There's a lot of room for error on the sleeve pieces and the body pieces because the shirt is pretty floofy in terms of fit. You could easily lose half an inch of width for seam allowances of 1/4 inch on each edge of the sleeves and the body and it will still be OK, but this is not the case on the cuffs and collar. There was a lot of bedsheet and these were not big pieces, so no lives lost.
With the pieces cut out, I next located my iron. I do own one, though I haven't turned it on since about 2007. (My current day job does not require clothing to be ironed or even particularly stain free.) Apparenty ironing is very important for sewing and hems and shit, at least as near as I could determine from YouTube sewing people. So I located it and found something I could iron on. (I do not own an actual ironing board.) My iron still works, nice! Even makes steam. Fancy.
Okay, so now I had ways to sew and things to sew. I assembled sleeve + gusset sub-assemblies because that looked reasonably easy to do. I sewed them together. The sleeve is a rectangular tube, so hard to mess up, except that you put gusset at the armpit end and don't sew the last like three inches on the NON ARMPIT end (because that's for your cuff opening).
On the big piece, I also cut an initial effort at hole for neck and seamed up sides of body part of shirt to where the gusset/sleeve would hook on.
Next I watched some youtubery on how to gather fabric. The sleeves at the shoulders and cuffs are gathered. The shirt neckline is gathered. There's a lot of gathering to be done for a Pirate Shirt, so I figured I should learn how to do that next. Fully informed about gathering methods, I gathered the sleeve top and pinned the gathered sleeve into body part of shirt where it should go.
I used about twenty pins to pin the gathered sleeve on, so that it would stay put and not let the gathers slip around. Next, I tried on the one sleeve shirt (carefully) to see how it was. The gusset was way too small, like ... hard to move arm and binding. Ugh. I only got poked a few times.
I unpinned the sleeve and picked apart the gussets from both sleeves breaking in my new seam ripper. I cut bigger gussets and installed them on the sleeves. I also had to spread out the shirt sleeve seams a little to fit the larger gussets because I'd seamed them for the smaller gussets that didn't work.
I carefully pinned a new-and-improved sleeve into the shirt, making effort to put the gathers in NICE and make everything look good and stuff. I really worked on this. And, because running sewing machine over gathered fabric seemed terrifying, I sewed in the sleeve by hand over the gathered part, with backstitching as per Bernadette.
This looked great. It was really effective and lovely and I did a great job with neat, tiny backstitching and the gathers looked very even. It would have been even better if I'd managed to keep the sleeve-to-shirt seams ON THE SAME SIDE as the sleeve-to-gusset and sleeve-to-sleeve seams. Oops. Bit of confusion there, so... hello, seam ripper. Allow me to pick out the beautiful, neat, tiny white backstitching that I just spent like two hours doing.
Removing the backstitching so that I could fix the sleeve fuckup took an entire episode of Bridgerton. Methinks that redheaded chonk bint doth protest too much on the "oh, I could never write like Whistledown" front.
I was mad about the sleeve fuckup. And I wanted some actual progress on the shirt front. I needed a win. So, I ironed and then hemmed the splits in the sleeves for where your hand goes through. (Where the cuffs open up when they are unbuttoned. I folded, ironed, folded, ironed, and then whip stitched. They look good and the hems are tiny and cute AND on the fucking inside of the sleeves. I triple-checked before sewing them. They are both done.
That went so well that I did the vertical slits at the neck part of the shirt. Again, tiny fold, iron the hell out of it, tiny fold again, iron the hell out of it, whip stitch tiny. Vertical slit at neck part is now hemmed CORRECTLY with the hem on the inside of the shirt. Huzzah!
Such hemming progress! So I embarked on hemming the bottom of the shirt. Now, this is pretty long and it hangs where it will be tucked into pants or a skirt or something and nobody will ever see the hem. I folded it over, ironed, folded, and ironed again. And then for reasons that escape me, I decided to hem it by hand. The pirate shirt is 42 inches wide of fabric. I am not 42 inches wide, but it's floofy and has a surprising amount of extra fabric in it. The bottom hem of the thing is thus 84 inches of hemming. By hand. With tiny stiches of white-on-white. I am halfway done. Interestingly, my hemming is getting a lot more even and attractive as I chug along with this. Practice. It is a thing. I am getting faster about it, too. But the hem remains about halfway done because I then felt confident enough to proceed with the more complicated stuff.
(There is no actual reason that success on something easy like hemming is going to translate to success on something not-so-easy like, y'know, sleeves or gathers or whatever.)
With the two revised sleeves pinned into the shirt and the neckline gathers installed in a temporary fashion, I tried the shirt on, very carefully. The new gussets look good, but the sleeves hung way too low. I regarded the sleeves a bit, in my bathroom mirror, with the sleeves hanging halfway to my elbows. That's not what Bernadette's shirt looks like. After enough thought that probably smoke was coming out of both my ears, I determined that the issue at hand was that the neck hole was too short side to side.
Yeah, I know. That doesn't sound like a good solution, does it? But it is. Pirate shirts are made so that the extra floofy sleeve material (the sleeve pieces are 20" wide before they're sewn into tubes) gets gathered at the armscye and the cuff. The extra floofy body material (the shirt has a body circumference of 84" and I assure you that I am not now nor have I ever been 84" around) gets gathered into the collar of the shirt. This gathering of the body material crunches it up quite a bit and raises the sleeves in the process.
The big takeaway here is that a pirate shirt is not a very... fitted garment.
The neckline is shaped like a letter T, where the top crossbar is pretty darned long. I did not quite understand this before regarding the shoulders of the shirt hanging halfway to my elbows. So, I cut the top crossbar of the T wider and gathered up more material to raise the shoulders of the shirt. I did this in two stages (... cut - gather - try on, cut - gather - try on) to make sure that I didn't fuck up.
I was somewhat worried about putting gathers into sleeve cuffs and armscyes. The sleeve-into-shirt part seemed easiest because the arm gussets are not gathered and thus can be sewn straight onto the shirt sides, leaving like a half circle shape that is gathered and fitted into the remaining amount of shoulder area. So I did that. It went OK.
Thus far, we have SHIRT WITH SLEEVES. Halfway hemmed. Neck slit edges hemmed. Cuff slit edges hemmed. Gussets attached to sleeves. Sleeves attached to body part of shirt. Neck hole sized correctly, gathers installed for neck opening, fit checked.
For the sleeve cuff ends, it was not obvious to me how it was supposed to work. I finally gave up and drew lines with my fabric pencil for (a) a line to stitch for gathers (b) a line to set in the gathered material THIS FAR BUT NO MORE and (C) Halfway IS HERE on both sleeve and cuff fabric.
After a couple of missteps, I ALSO decided to fold over and iron hems on my collar and cuffpieces so that the cuff and collar would not have awful raw edges exposed. Then I inserted the gathered sleeve end into the cuff, did my best to make the centers line up, mushed around the gathering so that it looked even-ish, pinned it aggressively, and proceeded to backstich the gathered sleeve fabric to the cuff ON THE INSIDE ONLY so that I could do a tiny whip stitch on the outside (visible) cuff to sleeve later. My whip stitching is less godawful than my backstitching.
For the collar, I marked... center back on shirt and collar, shoulder left and shoulder right on the shirt and collar. And I gathered and arranged the available gathers more-or-less evenly for each section and pinned the living hell out of the whole shebang and backstitched it together on the inside. Once I did that, I whipstitched the outside of the collar to the outside of the shirt.
So, now, collar and cuffs are installed. Remaining to be done: reinforcing squares at neck opening and at cuff openings. buttons x 4. button holes x 4. hem remainder of bottom edge.
But yeah, pirate shirt. In progress. And, it seems (lol) that I'm also learning how to make the sewing kind of happen, along the way. There will be pictures once I get it done.
no subject
Date: 2022-04-09 01:53 pm (UTC)