Video Notes:

I make a simple button down shirt with some amazing spider pinstripe fabric for Halloween!

http://www.barrowsandwights.com
IG: barrowsandwights
https://ko-fi.com/barrowsandwights

 

Notes:
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Pattern:
– pattern I took off of a shirt from Target
– Simplicity 1544

Fabric:
-Moda cotton – a pinstripe spider fabric

Thread:
– white polyester thread

Sewing Machine:
– Janome Quilt Companion

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Attributions:
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Title Card:
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Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

Logo designed and drawn by A.R. Gergler

Background Music:
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Music: Halloween The Pumpkin Head by Frank Schroeter
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6663-halloween-the-pumpkin-head
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/frank.schroeter.52

Music: Pumpkin Demon by WinnieTheMoog
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/6866-pumpkin-demon
License (CC BY 4.0): https://filmmusic.io/standard-license
Artist website: https://linktr.ee/taigasoundprod

 

Additional Media:
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success by grunz
https://freesound.org/people/grunz/sounds/109662/
CC Attirbution 3.0 License: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/

 

End Screen:
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Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

 

Transcript:
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[Music]

I’m just gonna hold this microphone because pinning it to the sweater is a little bit of a pain.

Hello. I’m Adrian. This is Barrows and Wights and I am not the best at time management. It is now October. I have a Halloween project planned. You’ll find out if I’ve finished this Halloween project in time to get the video out.

[cheerful twinkly sound]

So this is my backup Halloween project because I like making Halloween projects. Backup project, quick and easy, I’m gonna make a button-down shirt. I found this uh… Spider descending from the ceiling right in front of me is what I found. That is a teeny little spider. Friend… Friend, you need to go back up to the ceiling please. A couple of months ago now uh, I went on a yarn crawl with my mom and my sister and we hit a quilt shop in New Hartford on the way home from one of the yarn stores and I found this Moda fabric which just begged to be made into a button-down shirt that I could wear to work. There was not enough of this fabric at the quilt store at the time. I did go back and check to see if they had any more. They didn’t. They were out of stock, so I ended up buying it somewhere else. But it is the perfect Halloween button-down shirt fabric.

I’m going to use pieces from two different patterns to make this shirt. The main pattern that I’m using is a pattern that I took off of a shirt that I bought at Target a bajillion years ago, which 95% of the way fits me great. The problem is that the sleeves are a little bit too narrow for me to roll them up comfortably the way that I normally do. I end up having to like really strategically roll the sleeves so that I don’t break open the sleeve seams where there’s additional fabric and my arm. So I’ll be using the sleeve pattern piece from uh Simplicity 1544, which is my other go-to shirt pattern.

[electronic Halloween dance music]

Now that all my pieces are cut out, I’m going to zigzag any edges that will not be enclosed, iron everything, and then draw in my stitching lines. Because I’m using pieces from two different patterns and they have two different seam allowances, drawing in my stitching lines are going to be the best way to keep myself from getting confused. Here we have all of my shirt pieces cut out. They are ironed and pressed. All of the interior seams have been zigzagged. I just wanted to go through which pattern pieces go with which pattern. The two fronts and the back. So these are based off of the Target shirt pattern and any patterns that I do myself have a half inch seam allowance, so these will have a half inch seam allowance. The sleeves are from the Simplicity pattern, which have a 5/8 inch seam allowance like all Simplicity patterns do. These pieces on the end over here- let’s scoot you over here- are all technically from the Simplicity pattern because I didn’t bother tracing those out of the Target shirt. I just used the pieces from the Simplicity pattern except for this one. Usually with my Target shirt pattern, I just extend out the shirt fronts and fold them under a couple of times to make the button bands. So I generally don’t use the button band from the Simplicity pattern. However that would look really uh obvious on this striped fabric that my shirt fronts are not straight in the front. That’s just how the Target shirt wore on my body. So in order to make them look a little less weird, we’ve cut out the actual button bands. So these will have 5/8 inch seam allowances. Cuffs, neckband, collar- they’re all supposed to have 5/8 inch seam allowances. They look fine with the half inch seam allowances and for the neckband and the collar, I actually prefer how that turns out with the smaller seam allowance. Cuffs, I don’t care about because I never wear my sleeves down. My sleeves are always rolled up unless I’m freezing, so I really don’t care about cuffs in any way.

I should also mention that I will be using these Frixion pens to mark my pieces. You have no interest in focusing on these pens? The ink erases with heat, except on very dark fabrics. You will see a kind of pale white line on dark fabrics, but since this is a white shirt and it will all be interior markings and seam lines, I’m not worried about it.

I’ve done the first step of sewing on the front button bands and I like how Simplicity has you assemble this whole button band situation, but I realized as I was doing this line of stitching that it’s a little bit brain bendy if you’ve 
never done it before. So I’m gonna try to explain how this works. So here is the front of your shirt. Here is your button band. I think the Simplicity directions actually have you do this a little bit backwards, but I like the way that this way looks so I’m going to explain it this way. Like most seams wrong sides together (right sides together), do your line of stitching here. That’s all well and good. Pretty straightforward. The next thing I’m  going to do is iron down the seam allowance on the loose end of this. This seam allowance will follow whatever the natural seam allowance of the collar will be and the other end down at the hem, because I’ve already hemmed this shirt body, is kind of where the magic happens here I guess. So let me press this seam and press this seam allowance down and we will come back.

We’ve pressed our seam here. We’ve pressed down our seam allowance here. I luckily had this on a stripe of spiders, so that was nice and easy to press. Actually, I’m going to press this down flat this way because that will help before 
I go any further. Let me do that real quick. So we have that nice and flat. Now here’s where the trickery happens. We are going to fold this button band wrong side out. We’re going to press just this little end bit here and then we’re going to stitch a line following that hem just across this very bottom. So we’ll fold that, press it, and I will take my erasable pen and draw a line for you to see. We are going to stitch along this tiny line. Tiny line has been stitched. Press that. I’ve pressed my tiny seam. I’m going to trim down to a quarter of an inch, maybe a little smaller than that. I’ve also clipped off the corners as best I can without crossing the stitching. I’m going to turn this inside out. So now we have the inside portion of the button band with the folded down seam allowance on the inside of the shirt. The bottom edge is finished nicely. The top edge will be covered by the collar. I like to just press this down flat just before this seam line and then I whip stitch it down by hand because I like the control that that gives me to finish off the inside of this band. Actually, what I’m going to do right now is baste down this edge with this horrible thread that breaks all the time because then I can continue on with the shirt without stabbing myself with some pins. 

There’s a hair on my face I can feel it. I don’t even remember what I said yesterday on camera. However, I do recall going over some of the areas where I normally hand stitch down interior parts of the shirt, like the button band. I don’t remember if I mentioned it for the cuffs and the collar, but I normally do it there too and almost everything is basted for the hand stitching. However, I made some poor decisions yesterday with regards to another project and not stopping when I should have, so my shoulder is not pleased with me. Normally I would just put this off another few days. Today is October 22nd and I need to edit this video in time for Halloween, so I’m going to very carefully edge stitch the button bands, the collar stand, and the cuffs to get those all secured down. The Simplicity directions do tell you to top stitch down all these edges. I just prefer the cleaner look of whip stitched interior stitches. It’s better to have a finished shirt than an injured shoulder, so we’re going to machine stitch all that down. And honestly these are only details that you would see because I’m showing them to you. They’re not noticeably different when I’m wearing the shirt.