Normally at St Pat’s Op Shop, Repatched shop, we refashion existing clothes and items such as tablecloths, but a couple visited looking for some Australian type clothes for a destination wedding. He wanted an Australian tea towel shirt and a second shirt with an Australian theme, and apparently I was the sewist the others voted for. Well, thanks very much!

First I had to find Australian tea towels, which is not easy. One of the other women had some and they were duly delivered. I had a very sketchy set of measurements and a short time frame, so I began mulling placement. I was slightly concerned that I could waste those precious tea towels if the shirt didn’t fit, so I dug out a couple of the Dingo flour sacks and began planning the second shirt.

The flour sacks came from my eldest son’s garage. He found them when he bought his house and they were sewn together as a drop sheet. I nearly fainted when I saw it laid out on his floor! Can you see all the paint? I scratched and scraped off any lumpty bits and managed to harvest 24 of them, with painstaking unpicking of teeny zigzag. Google tells me that they are worth around $40 each, so I needed to be frugal with them. I did think they fitted the brief well as the flour mill is an iconic building on the road to Fremantle.

I decided to use Kwik Sew 3422 as it’s a pattern I’ve used for all my menfolk and it’s very straightforward and quite nicely drafted.

I needed some plain fabric to supplement the flour sacks. They are a flax colour, so I found a thick white sheet in my stash and dyed it with tea. It’s not an exact match, but it’s pretty good. This is the final make. The customer wanted a collar stand but no collar, and short sleeves. The buttons also came from my stash.

I was quite careful to get the stencilled word “sponge” centred across the yoke, but I clearly gave no thought to the placement of the rest of the flour sack. In retrospect I should have cut the top of the sack off and added it to the bottom. I kept looking at this and decided I just couldn’t live with it.

I unpicked the hem and added a piece of cotton tape taking a scant .5cm seam allowance. This dropped the hem by just enough to make it look a bit better.

I decided to drop this shirt off first so that the customer could try it on for fit. Apparently he loved it and was happy to part with a decent sum of money for it.

Whilst he was in trying on the shirt, he spotted a Star Wars sheet in a box in the sewing room above the op shop and got very excited as he’s a Star Wars freak, apparently. I was so relieved I didn’t have to piece tea towels together I gladly accepted the commission, even though my trip was looming and I was not the most organised. I looked at the sheet for holes and stains and identified a couple of stains. I made a note of where they were and began laying out the pattern, which was the same as I had used for the Dingo flour sacks.

I wanted to pattern match the front so that there would be a complete picture all the way across. However, there was a very large stain which would have fallen right in the middle of the right front. I had to compromise on the pattern placement, but it doesn’t look too bad.

I added a pocket, can you see it? I was thrilled that I had managed to get R2D2 in exactly the right spot for it.

Whilst I was congratulating myself and smugly taking photos, I turned the shirt around to hang it up and was appalled to find this!

I have no idea how I missed this stain – I had pressed the shirt a dozen or more times. I clearly need better light.

I threw everything at this stain and finally admitted defeat and pondered options. I could deconstruct and replace part of the back panel, but couldn’t face that, I could cut out the stain and cut a new piece of fabric to cover the hole, I could embroider a few flowers over it (ok, getting silly now), but in the end I decided to just stitch a patch over it – as in hiding the crime!

I decided that a large patch would be less obvious than a small one, so found the matching piece of pattern and pinned it on. Then I felt that machine stitching would be too obvious, so hand stitched the patch on and truly, you’d be hard pressed to spot it.

Darth Vader has also got a stain on his robe, but it blends in with the black so I decided to leave well enough alone.

I played around with pattern placement on the yoke and this was the best I could do.

The second shirt was duly delivered and happily paid for, and so I feel I have made a reasonable contribution to the charity.

I’m not sure how I feel about these sorts of commissions. On the one hand I know exactly what the customer wants, but I find the whole thing mildly stressful, especially when it’s on a tight deadline.

Anyway, it’s all done and now I must focus on making a few things for my trip – mostly for my husband, which is always more satisfying.