More Cool Shirts for the Nephews

Lately I have been making some cute bowling-style shirts for my nephews, and I am especially proud of the latest.

I made this shirt for my nephew using Butterick 3475, which is just a plain short-sleeved shirt. I made the contrast strips in the front and the yoke in the back by just drawing a line on the pattern where I wanted the seam to be, and then just tracing the parts separately and adding seam allowances. It is the same way that I made the dragon shirt for my older nephew.

This shirt has kind of a long history. The Three Stooges fabric was initially purchased to make a diaper bag for my brother when my nephew was born (nearly 2 years ago). Then my cat, The Mad Pisser, went on his rampage of death in the dining room and also managed to defile a part of the fabric that had been cut for the diaper bag. I yelled a lot, and threw it away. I then went back to the fabric store to buy more of the fabric, but it was all gone. So, here I was, stuck with a diaper bag with no lid, and unable to get any more fabric.

So, it sat. And it sat. And it sat. Until yesterday. I took apart what was left of the diaper bag and used the fabric to make this shirt for my nephew, the infamous "Fat Baby."

Overall, I am very pleased with the way it turned out. I basically did the same that I have been for the shirts I make for my older nephew, just in a smaller size. Except these are so tiny they feel like making doll clothes!

I started out by putting together the front and back panels. For each I used french seams and then stitched them down, so from the outside it looks like topstitching or a flat-fell seam. I set the sleeves in flat, so I did a french seam there as well. I just pressed the seam towards the sleeve:


I also used black binding on the edges of the fabric, and at the collar. I did not snip the collar and tuck the edge under and handstitch. I decided to do as little handstitching as possible since this shirt is for a rambunctious and filthy little boy, so it will not lead an easy life.


Here is the finished shirt from the front:


And here it is from the back. I also used the stooges fabric on the underside of the collar:


I know that the yoke is rather large, but I wanted to use as much of the stooges fabric as possible.

Since I have started making these shirts for my nephews, I have been contacted by a couple of people to make them for their kids (moms of my nephew's friends, mainly). Since I make these shirts with french seams, binding, and with the contrast insets they are very time consuming. I always explain to people that when I make them for my nephews, it is a "labor of love" so to speak, that it doesn't matter that it is ridiculous to make custom shirts with couture-style finishes for dirty, careless little boys who bring their pants back for patches just weeks after I make them. I also explain that given the amount of time that I expend on each of these shirts, I would have to charge $200.00 apiece to cover the cost of my time. Normally the response is a surprised "Oh! I didn't realize. Never mind then!" But recently I had a reaction that made me call my brothers and tell them to never, ever give my contact information to anyone who asks about those shirts ever again. I got a call from a woman at my nephew's school, asking about the dragon shirt. I gave her my standard response, that they are too time consuming for me to make, and I would have to charge too much blah, blah, blah.

Her response was ridiculous! She got angry! And she told me that I was "completely insane" to think that I could get $200.00 for a child's shirt.

My reply was less than cordial, when I pointed out to her that I did not, in fact, believe that I could get that much money for a child's shirt, and if she would work on her listening skills she would have gleaned from our conversation that that was the reason that I DID NOT make these shirts for sale and, by the way, just how much did she expect to pay for fully custom handmade clothing?

Seriously, I do NOT understand how little people think of other people's time, do they think that I should make shirts that take $15.00 worth of materials and hours of work for $20.00? Go back to WalMart, lady.

The little dude appreciated it, though. Here he is showing me his new shirt:


Here he is showing me how much he loves cookies:



And here he is honking Daddy's nose, Stooges-style:


My mom, grandmother, and niece also stopped by today to see the new floor, and Sadie zeroed in the new sewing machine, and wanted to try it out immediately:


She just sewed lines on scrap for about half an hour...she loves the new machine, and asked if she could make her next project on it. She was even more excited when my grandmother told her that it was EXACTLY the same as the machine that her mother taught her to sew on!