A man’s shirt

For quite some time I have been thinking of making perfectly fitted shirts for my husband. Now that I have had plenty of experience in making shirts and blouses for myself it wasn’t a big leap to try a men’s pattern. I chose to use Vado designs Made-To-Measure Slim Fit Men’s Shirt pattern from Bootstrapfashion.com.

The great thing with this pattern is that you can not only input the normal measurements for the chest, waist and neck circumference among others but also the shoulder slope and the posture. This was the reason for me to choose this pattern since in many of the men’s shirt patterns available the shoulder slope is completely wrong for my husband.

By the way, if you are considering making your first man’s shirt pay in mind that the sleeve length is measured differently for men than for women, so that you don’t input a wrong measurement. For women the sleeve length is measured from the shoulder to the wrist but for the men’t the starting point is not at the shoulder but in the middle of back of the neck.

The instructions that came with the pattern were sufficient if not at the level of the big 4. I was a bit confused by the instructions talking about the lapped seam that I have not used before. It would have been nice to have had some kind of little explanation for the sewers that were perhaps interested in trying out a new technique. However, the lapped seam wasn’t a requirement and there were “Beginner” instructions for those that didn’t want to use a lapped seam. I decided to use French seams since I wanted the shirt to look nice also from the inside.

This pattern doesn’t really have any ease. While I was half-way into sewing this shirt we had a short fitting session and the shirt seemed so small. My husband did have a t-shirt underneath, but he could hardly pull the button-plackets together. I was almost in the point of giving up but decided to finish the shirt anyway. The fabric was cut already and I was using buttons from an old shirt so I wasn’t going to lose any more money if the shirt didn’t fit.

After the sleeves were on and my husband put the shirt on properly, with buttons and all the fit wasn’t actually so bad. The fabric was pulling slightly at the waist so to make the shirt fit, I only had to rip out the darts at the back.

So, finally my husband got a great shirt. I love how it just disappears among his other shirts in the closet, since it definitely doesn’t look homemade. He has worn it already a lot.

I have now bought a new fabric to make a second shirt. Now that I have a tried-out pattern it will be super-easy to do.

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