Studio Saturday - towards a bespoke shirt

For quite a few years now I've been promising to make a shirt to fit my tall thin son, who can never find sleeves long enough. And finally it's happened, meant to be a surprise for his birthday. No chance of fittings during the process...

First step was to search shelves and elsewhere for my copy of this comprehensive book, published in 1993; it had wandered away from the Sewing shelf.

Over a leisurely two days, I made a pattern from his wedding shirt, which seemed to fit him well. This involved checking and rechecking the white shirt and the cross-and-dot paper pattern pieces.

The fabric is a strange sort of stretchy denim, quite heavy, so I looked for some lighter fabric to line the collar, collar stand, yoke, and cuffs. A happy byproduct of the search was the chance to sort out several more fabric drawers, and even allocate some fabric to the charity shop (sorted into ziploc bags and labelled "craft fabric")

 Which to choose? I slept on the decision...

Would he actually like any of these?

Fabrics from South Africa, Australia, Japan

I chose the Aboriginal design and started sewing, adding seam allowances of different widths as set out in the book.

A plan!

 Fussy-cutting for the patterned fabric

Following the grain lines -

Space near the sewing machine was a bit constrained, as the little kitchen hasn't yet left my studio, the carpenter has had other things on his mind -

I like how the hidden bit of the yoke turned out

 The cuffs will be fun too -

Before and after, or rather, model and sample

Practising making the placket - great fun -

For the birthday, this is what got packaged up -

Unfortunately the cuffs were a bit small and a new pair is being attached.

Even more unfortunately the fit of the back has inexplicable wrinkles parallel to the sleeve seam. But the shirt sort of works as a jacket over a teeshirt.

Next version will be in shirting-weight fabric and will be fitted to the body at each stage!