Modeling the Completed Lemon-print Shirt!

Friends, the shirt is finished!

A few things about this lemon-print fabric.  I ordered it on eBay and it shipped directly from China.  It was an experiment and I don't think I would do it again.  The cotton poplin is not very good quality.  That said, it wasn't expensive and the cost of shipping is folded into the price of the fabric.

I do like the print itself.  It's the nicest of the many lemon-print fabrics I've seen.  I like that the placement of the lemon branches looks random.  This meant that I didn't have to engage in any pattern matching.  The print is nicely saturated. The downside is that the poplin is somewhat transparent which meant that I had to interface the fold-back facings (as well as the yoke and collar) with opaque cotton from stash.

Where I didn't, like the hem, this is the result: the dark areas show through.  I don't mind this on the hem but on the shirt fronts, collar, or yoke it would have been disastrous (or as disastrous as anything related to sewing a convertible collar shirt can be).

In some ways I prefer using sew-in cloth interfacing to fusible.  The result is less crisp but I think it gives a higher quality result and you don't have to worry about fusible coming unglued over time.  BTW, this shirt will always be washed by hand and air dried.

Outer yoke is interfaced with a piece of white woven cotton from my stash so the inside yoke isn't visible from the outside.

Something else that's weird about this fabric is that on Amazon (and probably eBay too) you can purchase incredibly inexpensive lemon-print men's shirts made from a print that looks virtually identical.  Check this out.  And this.  There are others.  It's hard to compete with prices like those.

I've used many different vintage convertible collar (aka Aloha shirt or camp shirt) shirt patterns, but this time around I tried one that was new to me, Butterick 2233, which I suspect dates from the early 1960's.

For the short-sleeve version, you only need five pattern pieces: front, back, sleeve, yoke, and collar.  I skipped the pocket and pocket flap.

Even though there are two deep pleats in the back, this Butterick pattern has less design ease than others I've used from this period.  If you look at the front and back pattern pieces, you can see there's a little shaping at the side, which I welcome.  In my experience, McCall's and Simplicity shirt patterns from the period are fuller.

The pattern calls for horizontal buttonholes but I made mine vertical.  I associate horizontal buttonholes with women's blouses.

I used genuine mother of pearl buttons in front.  I also added a slightly smaller button to the back collar.

I sewed this shirt primarily on my pink Hello Kitty Janome sewing machine.  I didn't bother with real flat-felled seams; the fabric didn't warrant the extra effort imo.  I serged the seam allowances and stitched them down from the front to create faux flat-felled seams.  From the outside you can't tell the difference.

There's a button loop at the collar in case I want to wear it closed.  I imagine I'll wear the collar open 95% of the time.

Below are a few more shots.  Those are my new me-made jeans I'm wearing by the way.  There's also a little video on Instagram.

And that's it, readers.  I'm happy with the shirt and also excited to jump into the next project.

Happy sewing, everybody!