Shirt of Many Colors

Digital Fabric Adventure!

At Springs Creative Products Group we operate a digital fabric printing studio. The advantages with digital fabric printing lie in the lack of restriction on the number of colors which exists in screen printing (digital printing is like printing from your computer), no screen engraving costs (one screen per color) and no minimum production run quantity (typically 3000 yards per pattern for screen printing). With no limits on the number of colors, digital fabric printing is great for printing more complex designs which would be impossible to print in the traditional way. Learn more about the Springs Creative Digital Studio here: http://springscreativedigital.com/

We digitally print personalized licensed character fabric for JOANN. Customers can add a name (usually for a child) to any of these fabrics and order in even-yard increments (as little as one yard). We print and ship daily as orders are received...it's a fun idea for personalized gifts. Take a look here: http://www.joann.com/fabric/personalized-fabric/

Digital fabric prices are higher than for screen-printed fabric, but the value and options are also much greater. There are other consumer-direct sources for digitally-printed fabrics as well, such as Spoonflower. Check them out here: https://www.spoonflower.com/

Pantone Color Matching System

At the Springs Creative Digital Studio we sometimes print a Pantone "color blanket" on a requested fabric type to show customers how the hundreds of Pantone colors look when printed on that type of fabric (some fabrics have texture which may alter how the color appears). The Pantone company is best known for its Pantone Matching System, which is often used in the manufacture of colored paint, fabric, and plastics. (I used Pantone color numbers as reference points when I was the special occasion fabric buyer at JOANN, so all the various fabric types would match across the entire department.) For more information about Pantone look here: https://www.pantone.com/

Shirt Inspiration

A while back when surfing the web for shirt inspiration, I discovered a shirt that looked very much like a Pantone color blanket. I also saw the shirt pictured below on a catalog cover which was posted on my supervisor's bulletin board.

When I mentioned to my supervisor that it would be fun to copy that shirt, she brought me a Pantone color blanket printed on a textured fabric. If you've been following this blog, you may remember that this shirt was one of the options last summer in the survey of what readers of this blog would like to see made up (the seersucker suit won).

There are no pattern repeats on a Pantone color blanket, unlike most printed fabric, so there was no way to match a pattern at seams, or even for a front shirt pocket. That being the case I decided to apply the shirt pocket to the underside to avoid the pattern matching issue which would happen if I applied it to the outside of the shirt front (I could line up blocks, but the colors wouldn't match).

The Inside Shirt Pocket

Here's how I applied the pocket to the underside of the shirt front. I cut two pieces of solid fabric for the pocket (eliminating the usual upper pocket facing area and adding a seam allowance there instead).

I marked a pocket opening line on the shirt front using a water-soluble marker.

Tip: Test the marker on scrap fabric before using it. I didn't do that, and the marks didn't completely come out with water as they should have. That said, a Tide stain-removing "pen" did the trick.

Next I placed a pocket piece right-sides-together on the shirt front, and stitched a narrow rectangle along the marked line, cut the opening, and turned the pocket piece to the inside.

After stitching around the opening to keep it flat,

I placed the remaining pocket piece against the first one and stitched all the way around it, creating the inside pocket.

The raw edges were folded under against the wrong side of the shirt fabric and I edge-stitched them to the shirt front from the inside, which created a pocket-shaped stitching line on the shirt front.

The final step was stitching bar-tacks (tight row of zig-zag stitching) on each end of the pocket opening for stability. (Next time I make an inside shirt pocket, I'll insert a zipper in the opening before I attach the pocket back, for a different look.)

I assembled the remainder of the shirt in the usual way and I'm pretty satisfied with how it came out. It's a great conversation starter about our digital printing business (even here in the Springs Creative office), and a very unique look. Meanwhile, I'm testing a new pants pattern for the upcoming wool suit project...stay tuned!

Until next time, keep those sewing machines humming!

DTFM

danthefabricman@yahoo.com