I haven’t written anything for a while. That’s because I’ve been toiling away at finally getting that dress shirt fit right so I can start mass producing for summer. Well, there’d be variations on each one cause I have more creativity than I know what to do with, never mind duplicating anything!

What I was after was a dress shirt fit where the shoulders wouldn’t crinkle when you generally wore it. It would if I were to cross your arms in front, but probably not even if I had my arms folded or crossed, as people often do. The sleeve also had to be fitted, but still loose enough for me to do kung fu. Not that I kung fu, but that’s half my test for fit aside from looking like it fits. I don’t know if what I was looking for was possible, but I played naïve and believed it was and went to it.

And believed I did, because had I not, I’d be making dress shirts that just covered me. They’d be just like the ones I currently have, bought and altered once upon a time from my seamstress who retired several years ago, and I didn’t get into sewing to make myself Wal-Mart clothes for more costs and time.

So how does one measure belief? In this case, it was the 15 fit garments I went through, altering all kinds of things but mostly shoulder lie, width and especially arm hole and matching cap sleeves. That’s right, 15. Look in the picture below. There are even a few after that with further tweaking, but I also made them to learn other things for future designs.

Notice the variety of fabrics there, from what you can tell. I got everything from hard to soft stretch and shiny and fraying and light and heavy weights and so on. I learned a LOT through this process, from both fitting to sewing to ripping apart my prototypes. Yeah, I was still seam ripping them even though they were basted in. Silly me!

I have my first dress shirt now. It’s not bad and I’ll post it later. I’ll just enjoy looking back at this with pride for now as a reminder of my patience and determination.

Now I just need to find a person who makes crafts or something who can use these relatively small pieces of fabric, but reasonably nice and varied.