A little bit of Christmas sewing

Happy Seasons Greetings everyone!

One of the many things I have been sewing, but not posting, was a Christmas shirt for Husband.  I made him a wearable muslin for Christmas last year which he was very pleased with., using McCalls 6044:





Whilst we were in NewZealand, we bought some material from a fabric shop in Wellington (can't remember the name now) which was obviously bought with this shirt in mind. The picture below was taken in Novemnber 2010, andthe fabric has been sitting in my stash ever since:

Over the last year Husband has been slowly losing weight and getting fitter. He is very pleased with his progress, but is finding that many of his clothes don't fit so well any more. For example, a pair of jeans that he bought in the first week back from NZ in January 2011 that were a bit snug, he can now take off without undoing them!

The same applies to the shirt I made last year. I felt it was a bit on the voluminous side when I made it, but that is generally Husbands prefered style of shirt, however, since the weight loss it is even more so. I thought it prudent to take Husband's measurements before I started and it was a good thing I did... his chest has gone from 118cms down to 111cms and his neck from 44cms to 42cms. That meant that this time I made a XL instead of a XXXL - yay! Apart from changing the size, the only other thing I did was to make the whole shirt 5cms longer. Husband has a very long back and we noticed very quickly on his other shirt, that any further versions would need to be longer.

Again, no photo's of the construction as it happened.  I only decided to make this about 2 or 3 weeks before Christmas, so for me this was a speedy make, especially as I also decided to make something for Eldest as well (more in a later post).  As I was finishing up on the shirt, Carolyn posted about a shirt she had made for her Husband, in which she referred to a tutorial on flatfelling the sleeve seam. If only she had posted a few days earlier!

I struggled to find buttons initially, but these square ones caught my eye just as I was about to leave the shop and thought they were the perfect fit:

I am very happy with this shirt. It is much better put together than the previous version. The insides look considerably nicer too. I went for the view with contrasting collar stand and cuff and happily found a perfect piece of turquoise in an old pair of trousers that I had tried to butcher in the past.
 
I thought about trying to mimic the previous version with turquoise piping down the button band, but I couldn't work it out with the material I had in the trousers, so just stuck with the collar and cuffs.  

I put one pocket on the front:
 
and finally the completed shirt, donned for the day's festivities:
 

Meanwhile I recieved this from Eldest:

She made it all by herself on a little John Lewis sewing machine that I bought for her birthday!