Yes, I said ‘I’ve made a shirt!’  I’ve made blouses, and blouses that pretended to be shirts, but I wanted to make a shirt shirt. a real man’s shirt.[no, the one on the right isn’t it]  I may have mentioned that own David Coffin’s ‘Shirtmaking’ book.~ I bought mine from Amazon.co.uk and have found it helpful, inspiring – and very irritating! Usually all at the same time.

This is mainly because I am orient-dyslexic [no, not that I can’t read  Chinese, although I can’t!] , I don’t know my right from my left. Ask my family. I can find my way to virtually any location and seem to have an inbuilt sense of direction – I can read a map and scan-read oodles of written material, but ask me to reverse something or create a mirror image and I am hopelessly confused. I have been aware of this for many years and blame the fact that I am left handed. [This is highly disputed by the other lefties in the family – but what else could it be?]. Unfortunately I have been so highly alert to this problem of mine that it has now become a self fulfilling prophecy – SO this shirt has a history – oh yes! two left sleeves anyone? ~ and I am not joking, also I made a perfect collar and band, it went on beautifully first time, everything fitted……..but it was on back to front [i.e. wrong way up!!] Fortunately I could unpick the stitches and redo it just as well the right way, but a big headache nevertheless. The other things is – it isn’t a man’s shirt exactly – it is for my grandson Jacob who is 9 years old. No pressure there then. I certainly don’t have this many problems on my own things!

My daughter had given me an old school shirt of his older brother to take apart and grade a pattern from it. I wanted to construct it exactly as I would a man’s sized shirt a la David Coffin and try and make it as much like a RTW shirt as I could [there’s a paradox!] . Fortunately I am quite happy with the result. What do you think? You can click on the pictures to enlarge.

  and this is the reason I couldn’t leave the collar on back to front ~ I had put those stiffener doodads in the corner of the collar, so it obviously couldn’t be on top ~hoist by my own petard!