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Birthday flanno

I have previously made my son, Tom, a couple of flannel shirts (here and here)  but he has asked for more (he would really like one for every day of the week – I have considered agreeing to this and embroidering days of the week on the pockets. Who can remember the underwear that had this?)

I thought I might make him a couple for his birthday and so I knocked out the first one today in time for the celebratory dinner. 

Of course, no photo of Tom is complete without a photo of Heidi, his pup.

This flannel fabric is hopeless (you get what you pay for, and I paid $3 a metre for this fabric, so what can I say?). It is printed off the grain so, as I have previously reported, the decision has to be whether to cut it on grain or on pattern. I went on pattern, and managed to align everything except one side seam.

Note that I cunningly put the pocket, yoke and cuffs on cross-grain so that I didn’t have to do too much pattern matching. This saved massive amounts of time. Note in the photo below that the pattern doesn’t match on this side seam but matches perfectly everywhere else – this is because I went for a straight vertical line but the horizontal was off by about two inches!

I note that all the photos are the same as they are really more about Heidi than Tom (but this one does show that the other side seam matches).

The shirt pattern is KwikSew 3422 modified to fit Tom’s requirement for a close fit, rather than the slight bagginess of the pattern. 

I have made this shirt so many times that I can now make it in around 6 hours from start to finish and that includes matching the pattern and cutting out each piece separately to ensure that everything aligns. I no longer need to read instructions and now have the sleeve placket down pat.In case you are interested, Heidi is now 14 weeks old and is already responding to commands. She doesn’t quite have her ears under control (they flop over each other) and is totally adorable.

The details

Pattern is KwikSew 3422 made from flannel bought from Textile Homecrafts.

The brown object over the arm of the chair is my Miette cardigan in progress.

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