A Really Shirty Week.

That's right, "Shirty."

During the past week, I planned three shirts and sewed two of them, taking full advantage of a "snow" day here in Rock Hill, South Carolina, where we saw around an inch of snow on Wednesday, which shut everything down. The planned shirts include two which I plan to wear in the Patrick Lose booth at the Spring 2018 Quilt Market, and the third is a Valentine's Day shirt.

Shirt #1: Valentine's Day

In the move to Rock Hill in 2016, I donated my two Valentine's Day shirts which no longer fit me at the time. (How could I have known that I would lose enough weight in 2017 so they would fit again?) I'll share my new Valentine's Day shirt with you next time.

The other two planned shirts are using fabric from the Patrick Lose "Flower Power" collection, which has a decidedly late-60s/early-70s vibe in both color and styling. We wore a lot of brights in those days. That's the era when I started sewing, and I made some crazy clothing back then; if I can locate some pictures, I'll share them with you in a future posting here.

Shirt #2: Dots

The "Flower Power" shirt I sewed this week is made from the four tonal colors of Dry Brushed Dots from that collection: aqua, purple, pink and orange.

I used this Desigual shirt as inspiration, thinking that the adjacencies of the different patterns would translate well to the four colors of the dots fabric.

I also like the letters on the front of this shirt, and I could add letters to the front of the dots shirt using the black/white dots fabric, spelling out "dan the fabric man" or maybe just "dtfm."

To plan out color adjacencies for this shirt, I placed images of the different colors next to each other on my computer, representing the specific parts of the shirt. During the cutting process I eliminated one piece on the right front, flipped the pink and purple on the shirt back and changed the collar and cuffs to aqua, making aqua the dominant color.

This shirt was a lot of fun to lay out and sew up, and shows off the color palette of the "Flower Power" collection. It should be a great conversation starter with customers in the Quilt Market booth.

Shirt #3?

Well, that shirt is in the planning stages and I'll share that one with you later.

Until next time, keep those sewing machines humming, and I look forward to another "shirty" week soon!

DTFM

danthefabricman@yahoo.com