Menswear Sewing Class: The Dramatic Conclusion

Friends, I am well aware that after my spring break last month, I stopped providing weekly updates of my menswear sewing class at FIT.

This is partly because the last quarter of the class was largely review and partly because I got caught up in other things.  Class ended last night, alas.  It seems like we started a long, long time ago and we did: the end of January.

Yesterday we presented our final shirts -- all nicely pressed and displayed on dress forms -- and received our grades.  My shirt was the club-collared paisley Liberty I completed last week.  Other than cutting off a few stray threads and moving a button, it was exactly the same as you saw it here.

We also had a party -- we each brought a dish (mine was a dressed salad) and socialized for about an hour.  Then we said our farewells.

I gave Professsor B. a parting gift.  When I'd first shown him the Liberty-esque fabric I was using for my final project, he'd made a joke about whether there was enough for him too.  Well, at the store there was, so I picked up an additional three yards for him before the bolt was finished.  He gave me a hug.

Professor B. had very complimentary things to say about my shirt.  One criticism he had was that the edgestitching I applied to the bottom of the inside collar stand was, in places, ever-so-slightly off the bottom edge of the outside collar stand (which is hidden under the collar, naturally).   I have already forgiven myself.

The lower line of edgestitching on the inside collar stand...

...is slightly off the edge of the outer collar stand in places. 

I got an "A" -- not that anybody's ever going to ask, but as a blogger who writes primarily about menswear sewing, it does matter to me as you can probably understand.

Professor B. made a joke about my having made seventeen shirts during the class, which is a bit of an exaggeration: I made eight, always appying the techniques I'd most recently picked up in class.  I'm not sure I have a favorite -- do you?



















I still haven't made up my mind about taking an accelerated summer class (which would start in just a few weeks), but I'm pretty sure I'll be signing up for "Tailoring I" this coming fall, for which Menswear Sewing is a prerequisite.  That seems a long way off though.

In conclusion, this was an excellent class which I highly recommend to anyone in the New York area interested in learning men's shirt-making techniques.   And Professor B. (as in Blackman) did a marvelous job keeping us all (and we were at many different levels) challenged and supported throughout.  It was privilege to have had him as an instructor.

You can read all my class entries by clicking the Fashion Institute Classes link in my archives.

Have a great day, everybody!