Love Notions' "Dockside" shirt

 

Project for this weekend was finishing up making my first polo shirt for my husband. It has received the hubby stamp of approval! His comment was, "can you make a dozen more of these? It's more comfy than the ones we buy in the stores". 

The pattern I used was Love Notions' "Dockside Henley and Polo" pattern. It comes with my husband's stamp of approval. He's extremely fussy about what he will and will not wear, so if he approves, then it's a good pattern. The instructions were easy to follow and the shirt came together easily. The only issue I had was getting the binding to lay flat. I wound up hand stitching in place first, then stitching over it with the machine. I think the issues were mostly due to the very stretchy, thick, and spongy knit fabric I selected. 

He loves having pockets on his polo shirts - yes, he puts things in the pockets and often forgets those items when he throws the shirts in the wash so I have to be careful to check the pockets every time I do a wash load. He also wanted to have his company logo on the pocket instead of above it. That meant that I had to embroider the shirt before sewing it together. This turned out to be a good thing because this particular knit is extra squishy and stretchy, so I had to test several stabilizers before getting a good embroidery. I had to use Sulky sticky to control the stretch and added to it my usual cutaway stabilizer for extra strength and stabilization. 

The other advantage of embroidering the pocket before attaching it was that I was able to center the embroidery better because I embroidered on a scrap of fabric larger than the pocket then traced out the pocket shape after embroidering. This also helped hide any slightly crooked hooping if there was any. 

The back also embroidered much easier on a "blank" back piece rather than a full shirt. Much easier hooping exercise since I didn't have to worry about catching the sleeves or other parts of the shirt in the embroidery. 

I used my lovely 1975 Bernina 830 record to perform the sewing. I don't know what it is about Vintage machines, but I found I really like the way this machine sews knits. It does a much better job than my insanely expensive modern Bernina 830 Embroidery / Sewing computer. I really don't mind having to manually thread the needed and quite frankly, the only stitches I usually use are straight stitch and zig zag, so I don't need 1500+ other stitches. 

Ironing the neck binding on my clapper to get a good press. 

Stitching the collar to the neckline. The camera makes my bright sewing room look like a dark cave. I'm not sure why but that's what it does. 

Anyway, the shirt came out nice enough that my husband approves, so that's what's most important. I couldn't convince him to model it, but I'll try to get a photo of him when he wears the shirt.

HAPPY SEWING!!