Hey, wasn’t it terrifying/cool when we all got sent to shelter-in-place, and those of us with a working sewing machine had practically an historic mandate to spin artistic gold from our existing fabric collection? I’ve loved seeing other folks on the internet take a deeper dive into couture and vintage. I went in a totally different direction.
Here’s me:
Yep. Lotta shirts. Near the beginning of Shelter In Place I got this questionable idea that I should take apart a favorite-but-threadbare Brooks Brothers shirt and figure out why it was so much better than any shirt I’d ever sewn from a pattern, and then replicate it to noble but weird infinity like some kind of textile Vorta. (Star Trek superfans, I’ve got you.)
Aiding me in ShirtQuest was an early-pandemic Craftsy all-access special. I binge-watched David Coffin’s Shirtmaking Course and Janet Pray’s Sew Faster Three Hour Shirt course, and found my own technique settling somewhere in between: heavy on the cardstock templates and flat felling feet, light on the need to convert every possible change to a toile first. Also, I’m just going to say that David and Janet would probably both advise against these kinds of shenanigans:
I’ve worn the heck out of these shirts. They’ve practically become my uniform. At present, my closet only contains plaid shirts that aren’t homemade from a pattern I drafted off of that late-aughts Brooks Brothers button-down. So I was especially gratified to read this particular article during the mostly-bewildering pandemic fashion coverage:
The Video Call is Starting. Time To Put On Your Zoom Shirt.
It even opens by referencing a 70-day run of a Brooks Brothers shirt during the pandemic. Given BB seems to be emboringinating their women’s shirt lines, I’m pretty pleased to have my own supply now.
If you have a favorite shirt that’s on its last threads, I highly recommend deconstructing and re-patterning it. I learned a lot from this activity, perhaps most importantly that most commercial patterns I’ve been buying are an insane 2″ narrower at the armscye than my favorite shirt. What?? It certainly starts to explain why I tore so many of my pre-pandemic armscyes while biking to work.
…Gonna throw my Covid Carolyns in here too, just for good measure. They’re shirts. They have matchy pants friends, because they are pajamas. Should I have made matchy pants for all of my pandemic shirts, because nobody can tell on Zoom whether they are shirts or pajamas? This now seems like a missed opportunity to me.
