Sewing a shirt placket

For a start let's talk about the continuos placket or lap method of finishing a sleeve vent. Before we go any further let's talk about what this little unit's job is:

To finish the raw edges of the little opening above the cuff that is necessary so your hand can get into the bottom of a sleeve where it is closed when the cuff is buttoned up.

That's it. 

Raw edge finishing of a little slash that is about 3 inches long. 

This is not worth having a nervous breakdown about. 

And that might be where making a traditional, inevitably bulky, continuos placket can take you. Too many layers in such a small space with the monumental challenge of trying to sew through 12 layers of fabric (including seam allowances) diagonally across the top of the vent, over a wide throat plate hole, as is necessary in a zig zag machine, is a challenge that in my books hardly ever turns out well.

By contrast a tailored shirt style placket is dead easy and produces immaculate results with very little mental engagement, around here always a plus.

The way I do shirt placket requires photo copies or hand drawn copies of my simple pattern piece. When I put these little numbers in I do not:

• mark
• measure anything
• use more than a few pins
• stitch down anything until I have pressed and arranged it by eye so I know it will look right, if it doesn't I re-press till it does.

I do the entire placket by eye and feel and it works great. 

This is how I do it:

Step one:

• Cut out the placket piece.
• Make a little clip at the bottom of the sleeve where the cutting line of the vent should be.

Step two:

• Press under the two long edges of each vent by what looks to you like about 1/4". Just make sure that the pressing is about the same depth on each side.
• Press under the little pointy peak at the top of the placket, clipping in about 1/4" where marked in the attached diagram so you can actually fold the second side of the peak in. Turn it around to the right side and if none of this looks even and neat try it all again at the ironing board.

Step three:

• Pin the placket to the wrong side of the bottom of the sleeve so you are looking at two wrong side fabrics, this means the right side of the placket is facing the wrong side of the sleeve fabric.
• Pin a paper copy of the pattern on top of the placket lining up the marked cutting line in the centre of the stitching box with the little clip at the bottom of the sleeve.

Step four:

• Shorten your stitch length so you have smallish stitches and stitch around the stitching box.
• When this is done tear away the paper and cut up the centre of the box and right to the corners.

Step five:

• Turn the whole unit to the right side and press so the top of the box looks faced and square. If it is a little lumpy go back in a cut closer into the corners but don't stress about it - remember the placket part you see from the outside functions as a giant patch that covers all sins.

Step six:

• You now have a pointy big side to the placket and a thinner side, wrap the thin side around the stitching on one side of the box, just as far as you need to so as to cover that stitching and top stitch it down. Again don't fuss too much about the top it will also be covered up by the placket patch.

Step seven and the last one:

• Laying the whole thing in front of you fuss around with it with your hands until the placket part with the point covers what it has to and covers the part you just stitched up.
• When you have it the way you think a placket should look put in a few pins and stitch the folded under edge down, around the pointy part and back across horizontally. Go look at a shirt you have for a better idea of what you are trying to make this look like.
• You are done and it looks great.

Here below is my hand drawn pattern for a female sized sleeve placket. I have written in the directions for what to do with each marking so I won't get confused, which I often do when there are too many lines to figure out.

Note I don't actually make any of these markings, I just use the shape of the pattern to cut out the vents and the words and lines to remind me of how this goes together and what I am supposed to do.

Instead of marking I use photocopies of this drawing, or I trace off the outline shape and only the stitching box (cleverly marked with little stitches in this very home made drawing) and pin it to the placket and stitch through the paper in lieu of any more complicated markings.

The paper can then get torn off (easy if you use small stitches for stitching around the box), slashed, turned and the placket completed from the right side.

Pattern and instruction drawings for a sleeve placket below. Note this placket is fairly wide, it's one of several I have made up, but I thought it made the techniques easier to see. You might want to reduce this in width to suit your own taste, or use these methods with your own pattern piece:

Placket pattern and instruction sheet:

Placket pattern and instructions:

Kicking off with plackets

Jodie has emailed me to ask about sewing shirt plackets, as in the men's shirt kind, rather than the continuos plackets that are usually suggested in shirts for women. Pam Howard uses continuos plackets in her Craftsy course on sewing shirts and they are also a feature of the Alder shirt for women by Grainline.

I know this is a classic womenswear technique but I don't like it at all.

How I look at sewing explains why.

But before I go there, and I will be posting my own placket instructions tonight, I want to explain why I have introduce the new sidebar for any sewing issues you would like discussed.

Like most people I have used the time over the holidays to think about life changes/improvements. This time focused on things I actually want to do rather than half to do, or should do, which narrows it down a lot.

This is my transition year, my last of full time teaching and a move into doing only the courses that I really love according to my own schedule. I intend in filling the freed up time with more sewing and sewing communication. That's why I have started to teach a few sewing classes again and why I have been thinking about this blog.

I love this blog but I really want to keep up my communication with you all without feeling pressured. Ask any blog writer and there comes a point where they might think "I don't feel like sewing something but I have to - for the blog." I often wonder if this kind of pressure is why some of my favourite bloggers have suddenly dropped off the map.

So I wanted to blog more and talk about sewing more, in addition to my unsolicited and frequent flypaper thoughts, but without feeling like I had to be a regular production factory. There are so many other folks doing such a good job with that.

So I came up with this sewing issue idea, something that would allow me time to time to talk about sewing but only do a few hand-sized samples in between the larger garment construction projects. I also figured out, as someone who always tries to find the easy way, that doing a bit of this would help me build up my store of teaching samples and save me from having to complete a whole new garment every time I teach a class.

So that's it and tonight I will be posting on plackets done as painlessly as possible.

Make sense?

Just when you thought you have heard everything and a shout out to Stylearc

So much to talk about.

Christmas was one of those really good ones. I spent a lot of it walking around with things I wanted to post but time with my head out of the dishwasher was at a premium.

Enough flypaper thoughts to wallpaper a house. Enough sewing ideas to fill every room.

For some reason the holiday season always leaves me, after a long period of doing for family, with a burning desire to do some serious sewing for myself.

I started that today by downloading and sticking together a Stylearc pattern. They now have a bunch of their patterns on Etsy - such a good, good idea. Thank you Stylearc. Three sizes in one download, which is handy for those of who are weighing in at some lifetime upper end achievement numbers on the scale, and high instant gratification, with no postage fees for those of us who want to sew now.

I personally do not usually like sticking letter size pieces of paper to the dining room table with scotch tape for three hours before I can actually start making something. However I have to say that Stylearc's downloadables are in a totally different class to anything I have pieced together before. Clear with nice margins so you can cut around each .pdf so you aren't just hoping that the cut edges of the paper are lining up right. Feels very accurate and clean.

Me and Mr.Paypal will be visiting Etsy often over the winter I can see that.

Now back to the title of this post.

For various reasons, partially kicked off by my return to teaching sewing, I have been asked to look at a lot of sewing problems lately and asked for my two cents.

When you have made as many mistakes as I have in my sewing career a person gets pretty well qualified to identify what went wrong. She also comes up with a few ideas of how to make it go right next time.

Over the holidays it seemed to me that it might be interesting to share some of that here.

Which explains the new sidebar you see on the right.

Of course this advice will be coming from me, so you might want to consider that before you ask my opinion.

There is a possibility that I may tell you to just throw it out of a second storey window and drive over it with the car and go back to the fabric store - which is something I actually did once, but still don't want to talk about.

So keep things in perspective on this little project.

Now off I go with nothing to do but eat, sew and write things on my blog for the next few days.

Christmas countdown

Hi folks,

First of all I want to thank you for the supportive comments.

I mean it about a book. I want to write a sort of self-help book for sewers and I am going to do it. I have eight months of full-time work left and that will be my percolating time.

Stay tuned.

I also want to say I need some time to grab to answer the interesting comments that have been left for me, but it is nuts, with Christmas stuff and work things going on.

So what I have to share tonight are flypaper thoughts:

• One week to go
• The secret is to lower expectations
• For yourself first and other people second
• All the good things in a family and a life can't be expected to come together on one day of the year
• I have multiple decades of personal experience backing this one up
• They must sell a ton of super bulky yarn the week before Christmas
• My son-in-law had not serious but highly uncomfortable surgery yesterday
• The kids have colds
• The son arrives late the night before Christmas with the fiancee
• Things shaping up as normal
• Just fuse a small piece of knit interfacing where they tell you to stay stitch at the clip
• Who need to pick those stay stitches out at midnight?
• Do you think a Sirarcha and honey cookie will be too weird?
• Who would even ask that?
• Will report tomorrow
• Fluffy slippers are excellent
• One year I had four minutes between the time the last one went to sleep and the first one got up
• Am most disturbed that the early spring patterns are all for waisted full skirted dresses
• Waists move around in fashion but where yours should be is the worst place
• Miss Heidi has taken this lump of coal thing to heart
• Walking around in stubby legs muttering "that time I screamed at my family I was a baby. I am going to be good now I am a big girl"
• Makes me feel bad that I told her about Melvin Clark
• The kid I actually know who once got a lump of coal
• Parents pulled those stunts in the old days
• It appears grandparents pull them now
• She is already stressed enough for three
• And not just because of the sneaky looking Elf on the Shelf
• Like about racoons
• I told her about the time I found a racoon hand under the cushion on the couch
• Must have fallen off someone in the backyard
• Birdie brought it in for a present
• I live in Nova Scotia after all
• One more story and I am going to be put on grandmother probation
• She would rather stand than sit on the couch
• Much like her father
• These things happen
• Why would my husband think I wanted a car that can talk to me?
• I get into the car for peace and quiet
• We have traded back
• If kids can't spill juice in it then it's not for me
• My neighbourhood is famous for Christmas lights
• We have tour buses drive slowly all night
• Makes you run downstairs to throw the switch on while wearing your fuzzy slippers
• The last thing we were famous for was the Bird House gang
• Bunch of gangsters were going into yards at night and switching around the bird houses
• Giving the senior men fits
• Only their wives laughed
• It's a tough neighbourhood
• Do they still sell red and green Rice Krispies?
• In case the Sirarcha cookies bomb
• As if that's going to happen

Archer shirt

Yes I know I was a sort of sign upper for the Archer shirt sew-along and finished that shirt about a month ago, but haven't got around to posting anything on it yet.

Here is a simple hanger shot:

The fabric was a voile cotton with almost a suede finish which will explain some of the odd colour shading.

This is a very good pattern.

Well-drafted, which means it slots together well, and a great fit for a comfortable shirt. Good smart directions too.

My only comment is that it uses the traditional blouse continuous lap placket which is something I hate doing. Far too many fabric layers in a short space and as a result they never, IMO, lie flat (I have turned the sleeve around for the photo so you can see what I mean.)

Far better to use a nice neat, and if you want a more feminine version a smaller, proper shirt placket like the one I put in a Negroni shirt for my nephew last night:

I know there are versions of this being put on the Archers over at the sew-along. However again I think that doing it in two pieces is unnecessary - a one pattern piece version, as you find in the Negroni, is just so much easier and always turns out perfectly. The trick is of course to trace the stitching box on typing paper and pin it directly over the placket piece on the shirt sleeve and just stitch through the line on the paper with a small stitch (you can tear the paper away easily afterwards) to get around what looks like complicated marking on the pattern piece.

I know I should be doing some tutorials, but it really is getting a little nuts around here pre-Christmas time. Hopefully I will get a chance to catch up.

I have been reading a lot of indie pattern instruction sheets lately and I am also thinking I really need to write a sewing book.

Soooo many of these patterns (some of them designed by folks who are now publishing their own basic sewing books) are just telling sewers to do things the hardest way possible and with that the largest margin for error.

Over and over again I want to say "there is an easier way to do this, there really is, with better results". 

It seems to me that some of these talented young designers are looking up techniques in standard sewing texts. Fair enough but they are missing out on the knowledge of a whole generation of sewers, brilliant women who were under-employed as housewives and went on to write amazing books (often self-published and I have them) full of smart and nifty ways around sewing problems, and to teach and broadcast in some places really interesting classes where they taught their methods.

The problem was that this work was often not well captured and the new generation of sewers can't access it.

But I can. 

I read those books, I took those classes, I taught those classes. 

I knew those women. I was the part of the last generation they passed on a way of thinking about sewing to.

Someone has to get this information out there.

I really am seeing too many gapping knit necklines ( 3/4 ratio for self fabric, 2/3 for ribbing, pin-and-mark-in quarters) too many V necklines done in the way that has a 99% chance of ending in a little bump rather than a way that has a 99% chance of success first off.

So I need to write a book and have to figure out how to get that done.

Now off to packing that shirt off for Winnipeg.

Sewers are born not made

I have many, many things to write about right now but tonight I want to share what my middle granddaughter did today at nursery school.

It was her day to make a wish for what she wanted her circle group to do as an activity. Usually it is a story or a game etc.

Today Miss Heidi said her wish was to sew ballet clothes. So they got her some fabric and helped her cut and this is her outfit. Note she even made her shoes:

Lately, since the baby, Miss Heidi has had a few time outs for things like cutting the points off the bunting flags her mom made to decorate her room, and cutting up her own clothes and gluing them to the floor (I am a terrible grandmother I just laugh no matter what goes down over there) but I am putting this together now.

This kid is just a born sewer trying to get out.

And I am ready for her.

Christmas baking : not too sweet ideas

Yes I know.

I am still marking.

However that doesn't mean I don't go AWOL every once and a while and surf the web during break time.

I am often amused by the cookie recipes published this time of year, based on the assumption that your average busy person, with a job, family and 8,000 responsibilities has spare time to make ganache, dip delicate cookies in chocolate and role in toasted pecans, or ice up little numbers like these:

I can tell you for sure that anyone who is spending her time on projects like this is way behind in making up her Lazy-boy tops.

Way behind.

There is also a limit to the amount of icing sugar, cream cheese and butter a person can buy these days when the rest of world has gone diet responsible. Not everyone tucks away the sweets like they used to, or I still want to.

So with all of that in mind I was quite interested in, and wanted to share, these Washington Post recipes for off-beat Christmas cookies.

I might actually make some of these.