Commission - flannel shirt 1

I have been (very slowly for life reasons) been embarking on something new which I hope will help me level up my pattern drafting and bespoke clothing making.

My dad has commissioned me to make him a casual shirt for the autumn/winter - something nicer than a t-shirt, but not a dress shirt.  I suggested flannel and found this fabric:

Oo - another familiar pic...

I've been working with a book called Metric Pattern Cutting for Menswear by Winifred Aldrich which was recommended to me by the lady who ran the bra making weekend I went on earlier in the year.  It's very much geared towards students looking to work in the industry and focuses on how to create pattern blocks and subsequent designs for the standard sizes used in retail, but also has a little on how to apply the blocks in this book to an individual.

Admire my fancy tissue bookmarks (unused I promise)

There are are just a few basic pattern blocks in the book from which you can create pretty much any menswear you'd be likely to see on the high street (obviously really out there high fashion stuff is a little different - this is for menswear that a man might actually wear).  So there are blocks for formal and casual shirts, a couple for trousers and one or two for outerwear and that's about it.  Then it goes into some ideas for how to modify the blocks to make interesting garments.

Casual shirt and knitwear blocks

This is the leisure shirt for Dad and how to create it from the block

This is definitely not a beginners book - while the instructions for creating the blocks are detailed and well explained, the instructions for transforming those blocks are less so.  After all, they're mostly just supposed to be suggestions of how you might want to change things so occasionally miss out little bits of detail or assume you have enough experience or desire to experiment that you can work out the finer points of the design for yourself.  Also it provides absolutely no instruction on how to sew the finished patterns at all - this is intended for designers who either will have other people sewing it together or who should have enough experience to do it themselves.

I love it.  It's slightly scary working from first principles (and hoping I've measured Dad accurately), but I love watching the blocks take shape and then the blocks turn into something recognisable as a shirt pattern.  I'm definitely doing a mock up rather than going straight to the good fabric to make sure, but it's looking really credible even with just the paper pieces.  And the avenues of design it opens up......I have no desire at all to become a great fashion designer, but I'd love to be able to just create whatever turns up in my head confidently.  And it might actually look professional and fit without a million iterations!

So on to Dad's shirt.  First the block (apologies for not being very easy to see - perils of using brown paper).

Wow, that's even harder to see than I thought...but you can see it's just two pieces right?

The many pieces of a casual shirt

And these are all the pieces that come from those first two.  This has actually already been cut and mostly sewn in the mock up fabric (I'm procrastinating around the plackets....I hate cuff plackets...) and hopefully soon we'll all be able to see how close this actually comes to something Dad might want to wear. 

In the next blog post in this series I'll talk about fitting the mock up (and why I use "mock up" and not "muslin" or "toile") and making any adjustments to the pattern.