How to sew a Button Down Shirt - Pattern Reading Tutorial - Sewing for Beginners - Tock Custom

welcome everyone I am tock custom and we're finally doing the button-down shirt tutorial video so by the end of this you're gonna learn how to make a shirt that looks just like this alright so first we're gonna talk about what you need to get started and then we are gonna just jump right into making a shirt alright now to get started making our shirt you're gonna need some kind of a pattern and I already did a video on how to read and make your own pattern so if you missed that you might want to go back and watch that otherwise if you've seen it you should have your pattern all made up now I've got about three yards of a woven cotton fabric here and I think I need about a yard of a fusible sheer weight interfacing if you don't know what that is I'll explain it when we get to that part then you'll need some cutting tools and I've got six buttons if you want to do the top collar button you'll need seven buttons and then you're gonna need like a sewing machine and thread and maybe some top thread and things like that so I'll explain it as we go along and I've got plenty of coffee here so I think we're ready to get started and obviously the first thing we have to do is cut our fabric so we're gonna get ready to cut this out alright so I am going to lay out my fabric and I've got this folded in half my fold line is over on this side and it is extremely important that you pre wash your fabric before you make any clothing ever if you do not pre wash your fabric and then you go and wash this stuff your clothes will shrink and they will look really weird so make sure you pre wash your fabric okay so I'm not going to explain how to lay and cut everything out but the one thing I will explain is that this back piece right here has got to be lined up with the fold line of my fabric so when I cut it out it's going to open up as one big solid symmetrical piece so every other panel of your pattern can just be cut out anywhere on the fabric that it fits and it's going to cut out two of every shape since this is folded in half all right so we've cut out all our pieces and I am going to pull out our interfacing and show you how we cut that out now now we have to cut out a few pieces of fusible interfacing from our pattern if you don't know what fusible interfacing is it's the stuff that makes your collar stiff or the cuffs in a dress shirt stiff and it will fuse to your fabric and add some more strength and stability to your fabric all right now the way fusible interfacing works is you've got a bumpy side and you've got a smooth side so the bumpy side has got all these little dots of adhesive that when you heat it up and press it with an iron will fuse to your fabric so that's the way this works now for this pattern we have to cut out one piece of interfacing for the color stand one piece for the collar and then we have to cut out two pieces of interfacing for the two plackets that we have all right so now we've got all of our interfacing cut out so you should have two pieces for your front button plackets your color stand and your color interfacing itself all right now that all of our fabric and our interfacing is cut out now it's time to cut out or nachos now some people do this differently but the way I do it is if it's a single notch I will cut out a little diamond on the inside very small and you don't want to cut past the seam allowance and then if it is a double diamond like this one I'm gonna just cut a wider V and I don't cut the fabric completely out now over here I've got a single one so I'm gonna cut out a single V you've got one more here and the purpose of these notches is every different piece has little notches that help you line up your panels with each other so that everything fits perfectly now in this example there's a big dot right here and this is where your center shoulder seam is going to come together so what I always do is I just do a single cut right where that dot is so I know that when I put my sleeve on this little split in the fabric here is gonna match up with my Center shoulder seam okay now I'm just going to very quickly go through all of my different patterns that have notches and I'm going to cut those out and when I am done cutting these out I will show you what our first steps in sewing are just as a quick example of how I cut up my notches if it's a single notch like that I'll just cut out a simple little triangle and if it's a double notch like this I will cut two little slits so that it will fold back I don't actually cut that out just because it takes too much time but I can clearly see that this is a double notch and this is a single notch alright so this is still a short making tutorial but it's also a pattern reading tutorial so I'm going to make a few references to the actual pattern now on step one it just tells us to interface everything so let's do that so let's interface all of our parts alright now I'm going to use our color as an example of something that we're gonna interface so your collar is going to be in two pieces and we are going to put interfacing on one piece of this and I will show you how that makes sense as we move along with the construction but thankfully this fabric doesn't have a right or a wrong side it's really the same on both sides but what you want to do is you want to lay the bumpy side of your interfacing onto the wrong side or the inside of your fabric all right now I always start in the middle and when I do my interfacing so I am just gonna put some nice heat there and this is on the cotton setting and I'm just going to very slowly kind of roll the interfacing and if it kind of goes over the edges of the fabric that's totally okay because we can trim that off but I just want to smoothly fuse this interfacing to my collar panel here alright so now we've got one piece of our collar interfaced and the other side is not and we're not going to talk about how this works just yet but I'm going to take these and set these aside so for the collar stand we're gonna do the same exact thing where I'm gonna take my interfacing and I'm gonna fuse it to just one of the pieces alright now I'm gonna set these aside and for our plackets there are two pieces so don't forget there is a notch I don't know if you can see that on camera but there's a notch right there so I just want to make sure that these are mirror images and then I am going to put interfacing on one side and again if you have a patterned or textured fabric make sure that this is going on the wrong side or the ugly side of the fabric all right now you should have to interface pieces for your plackets one of your color stand and one of your color pieces should be interfaced and now we're good to go all right so now we're gonna look back at our pattern and we've got steps two through seven that tell you how to do a breast pocket on your shirt but I already filmed a video on that so if you click on the little thing up here it will take you to a video of me teaching you how to do your very own breast pocket or if this makes sense to you or you don't want breast pockets you can just skip all of these steps altogether alright so looking at the next page I can see that steps 9 all the way through 16 are not the version of the shirt that we're making but I want to take a closer look at step 17 here alright in the last video we talked about doing the pattern for shirt style a right here which is the short sleeve collared shirt so on the pattern it says all views so that includes pattern a so we are going to do this step all right so this is the first time we're actually constructing pieces so I'm just gonna read this it says stitch back and front sections together at shoulders so it shows you little dotted lines where we're gonna sew so let's show you how that looks in real life all right so you're gonna need your front panels in your back panel and I did my breast pocket and a little embroidery just to make this look nice and spicy so I'm gonna take my back panel and I'm gonna open this up now you want to lay this right side up so if you have textured fabric make sure that you can see the the pretty side of your fabric here what I want to do now is I want to lay my fronts right sides together with the right side of my back panel and it wants us to match up our shoulder seams like this so I'm gonna take a pin I'm gonna put it on the left side of my left shoulder and then a pin on the right side and you know what because this fabric is really delicate I'm going to do three pins then I'm going to do the same thing for this other shoulder seam all right because this is an intermediate project I'm not going to show you every single stitch on the machine so I'm going to do a stitch right here and right here on these shoulder seams at a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance just like the pattern said all right so you should have something that looks like this we've got our nice clean straight stitches on our shoulder seams and because I have a serger I'm gonna be surging all of these seams so that it stays nice and clean on the inside all right so I chose to Serge the inside of my seam and just to show you the outside here I also did a top stitch on there so I've got a nice solid black top stitch and that also will hold the seam in place on the inside that that won't move around at all so that's how I'm gonna finish my seams there's lots of different options but you guys can do whatever you are comfortable with all right so the next step says sleeves and side seams and then it gives you this really terrible picture that I didn't understand when I was brand new at sewing but I figured it out so I'm gonna show you how to do this in real life without having to figure it out on your own so anyway you should have something that looks like this if you lay it out so I got my back panel I got my left front and my right front these are our shoulder seams so what I'm gonna do is if I take this whole shirt and turn it to where the right front and the back come together and it's gonna make this big armhole this is where our right sleeve is gonna go alright so I'm gonna be honest doing the sleeves is my least favorite part of making a shirt it's not that it's hard but you'll know why when you end up doing this so anyway this should be the right side of your fabric facing up and you are going to be putting right sides of your sleeves together so that little circle on our pattern should have left you with a little split and we're gonna match up right sides together with where that dot was on our pattern with our center shoulder seam here alright so you can see that on the front panel there's a single notch here and on the back panel there's a double notch cut out so you need to make sure that your sleeve matches up properly otherwise your sleeves will be on backwards so my double notch is here so I'm going to my double notch of my sleeve with the double notch on my shirt I'm gonna put a pin right there and then before I do the front what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pull these two pins that we just put together nice and tight and we have to try to line the fabric up so I'm gonna be like pulling this from the back so what I want to do is find the center point between those two pins and try to line the fabric up so that these edges are flush with each other and I'm gonna put a pin right there okay now I'm gonna do the same thing between these two pins where I'm just going to line up the direct edge of that fabric so it's nice and flush and I'm gonna put a pin there and do this is evenly as you possibly can sometimes you will get some pleats and I will show you how to fix that if that happens and again I'm just going to keep putting pins and lining up the fabric so it's nice and flush I'm gonna do this all the way to the edge of where our armpit will be so now from this point I'm not going to match up these edges here I'm just gonna make sure that these stay nice and flush with each other all the way to the edge okay so now we have the entire backside of the sleep done and there's about half an inch of fabric left over and that's okay and I'll show you why later so we have the back half of the sleep done now we want to match up our front single notch of our sleeve with the front single notch of our front panel I'm going to put those together so they're flush and then I'm going to put a pin to keep those in place all right now I'm gonna do the same thing where I'm gonna try to find the center of both panels of fabric by pulling these tight and then I'm gonna do my very best to make sure that those edges of fabric are nice and even with each other and put a pin between those two do the same thing where I put a pin between these two pins so everything is nice and even and then I'm gonna do one more right here actually this is going pretty well and again I'm not gonna try to line up this outside edge even though this seems to be kind of working out a little bit here but I'm just making sure that this stays nice and flat and even all the way to the edge and yep there's a little bit of extra fabric on the top side here and that's also okay all right now hopefully you have something that looks kind of like this here so this is our Center shoulder seam up top and then we've got everything pinned as flat as possible all the way to these edges the reason this is so hard is because you're taking two very curved pieces of fabric and trying to pin them together in a way that feels very unnatural but if you're able to do this you've done a very good job now I think I'm gonna show you how to do this on the machine but what you have to do is you have to pick this up and I'm gonna try to lay this flat in a way where I'm gonna be sewing on a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance all the way from here all the way up here but what's gonna happen is this fabric is gonna start to kind of pull so I have to keep shoving this under like this while I'm feeding this seam through the machine to make sure that I don't sew through any on wanted fabric and I'll try to explain that as we're doing this on the machine right now all right so here we are doing our sleeve seams so I'm gonna start at the end where my pin heads are on top and I'm gonna do my very best to show you guys how I'm doing this so again I'm at a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance and I'm going to do a back stitch just like I always do now I am going to try to pull out my pins as I'm sewing this and the important thing is that you're looking underneath your fabric the entire time to make sure everything is tucked under like that otherwise you're gonna find yourself sewing through parts of your shirt that you don't want to so I'm just gonna keep following this line and I'm gonna pull out my pin every time I get the chance and I'm gonna every time I pull out my pin I tuck the fabric underneath okay so far this is going very well so now I am officially at the center shoulder seam and everything is still nice and tucked under here so that I'm not sewing through anything I don't want to and I'm just following this curve it curves very heavily here okay just make sure you keep looking underneath your fabric as much as you're looking on top again forgive me for being overly thorough during this part but this is one of those things that once you get it right it looks really really good alright so actually at this point the hard part is over now it's pretty much just a straight stitch all the way out and I don't have to worry about anything underneath everything is looking pretty sharp right now all right now I'm gonna back stitch to finish that sleeve seam and we are officially done with doing our first leave seam alright so on the front and back side of my entire seam everything came out nice and smooth I didn't get any pleats which is exactly what you want now I'm going to Serge this entire seam I don't do any top stitching with this but I will clean this up and Serg this whole seam right here I'm gonna make this real quick but if you have a serger and you're doing your sleeves be extremely careful because if you make a mistake it will cut into your fabric and it will ruin your project so if you're surging make sure that this is tucked under at all times otherwise you cannot recover from an error like that without starting over all right we got this all done so let's take it over to the table and see how it looks all right so here's how mine turned out and actually this looks really clean I'm actually pretty happy with this so here's our shoulder seam here and this is all the inside of the shirt so if I flip this over alright and here's how it looks on the outside and it's hard to make this lay flat because it's meant to kind of drape around your body but this looks nice and clean so I think we did a good job on her first sleeve I'm gonna do the other one and then I will show you guys what is next alright so now we've got our sleeves on we've got our two front panels and we've got our Center back panel here so now let's take a look at the pattern and see what it says to do next alright so now we're at the side seams here and this one's really easy to understand so it just says pin the front and back sections together at the sides all the way up from the bottom all the way to the tip of the sleeve so I'll show you how that looks right now alright so basically I'm just going to take my shirt here and I'm gonna lay this so that the right side is facing up and I'm just gonna do one side at a time here so I've got my sleeve facing out that way this is my front and here is my back laid out all flat so all it wants us to do is to fold this in half so that right sides are together so you should be able to see the inside of your seam here alright so now I'm just going to match up the corner of where the sleeve will come together here and I'm gonna put a pin right there then I'm going to match up the bottom side seam of the shirt right here and I'm gonna put and right there now right here there's a double notch which might be hard for you to see on camera but I can see that those match up fine right there so I know to put a pin there and then I always put a pin where the two seams of where the armpit will be so that those match up properly if someone to put a pin right here also there's another set of notches in the middle of the sleeve which is pretty easy to see so there's another pin right there so now that I've got all my focal points of where those pins go I can start pinning the rest so all we have to do to pin the rest is just pull between this pin here and this pin here nice and tight so that the fabric lines up nice and flush I always find the center point and I'm gonna put a pin between those two areas I'm gonna do the same thing right here where I pull it tight put a pin right here and then I'm gonna put one last pin right between these two over here so now this is all pinned up and ready to go and I'm gonna actually pin up the other side so we can do both stitches at the same time alright so you should have something that looks like this so we've got the bottom side seams pinned up all the way up to the armpits and then to the outside of the sleeves now I'm not going to show you how to do this on the machine cuz it's pretty simple but I'm just gonna do a straight stitch from here at a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance all the way through the armpit seam into the edge of the sleeve and then I'm just gonna surge and over lock this whole seam right here alright so my side seams are done and you should clearly be able to see my regular stitch right here and then I did my over lock surge stitch all the way up so that it looks nice and clean alright so now we're on steps 20 and 21 and this tells us how to hem the opening it of our sleeves now I kind of skipped this because I'm a little bit more comfortable with just going right to doing a top stitch so I am gonna show you how I do this on the machine right now the first thing you're gonna want to do is most machines have a little can that you can take off here and it's gonna allow you to wrap fabric around your machine like this which is great for sleeves and pant legs and stuff like that alright now I'm gonna try to show you how I get started doing my so I've got this right-side out so I've got the outside of my sleeve here and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn this over about half an inch so it looks like that on the inside but then there's all this raw edges so I'm gonna roll this over one more time so now I've got a nice beginning of a rolled hem and I'm going to do this right on that armpit seam underneath your arm so that's how I start so I've got this rolled up and I'm gonna put this under my presser foot and I'm gonna put the foot down right there now I'm gonna kind of wrap my sleeve around the entire arm of my sewing machine here and what I'm gonna do is it's gonna be really hard to see this you have to kind of feel it but I've got my raw edge of my fabric on the sleeve here so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna fold this over about half an inch like we just did and then I'm gonna roll this over again underneath one more time I'm gonna pull this kind of nice and tight so I can feel that from right where the presser foot is all the way up to where my pinched thumb is here that that's rolled over and as I'm sewing it's gonna lock a rolled hem in place I'm not I'm not gonna iron this I'm just doing this kind of freehand because I've done it a lot and it takes a little bit of practice but it's really not that hard now while I'm doing this I can feel where that rolled hem is in there so I'm gonna try to line that up so it's just at the left of where my needle is so I'm gonna do a few stitches to start and now as I'm moving I'm just gonna keep making sure that I am tucking and rolling my fabric underneath as I go so I'm gonna go about three or four inches at a time and as I get to wear my pinched fingers were I'm going to again find the raw edge do a half inch fold over and then another fold over again pull that nice and tight and I can kind of see and actually feel where that is and I'm just gonna keep doing this about three or four inches at a time until it goes all the way around the entire sleeve now as I'm coming up to where we started I can see my stitches here so this is actually gonna start kind of holding its shape by itself so I don't really have to pinch it anymore because the stitches are holding it in shape so now I just have to complete this stitch and I want to make sure that my stitches line up with where they started and I'm going to trim those very close so as you can see this is where we started right here and we've got a nice rolled hem all the way around and if I look at the inside you can see that it's locked up all of those raw edges on the inside so that it's gonna stay nice and clean and you won't have to worry about any frayed fabric or anything like that so this is a very well done rolled hem now I'm just gonna do the same thing on the other side and then we will see what the pattern says to do next all right so we just did our sleeve rolled hem but then all of these steps 22 all the way through 33 are how to do dress sleeves and since we're not making a dress shirt we can skip all the way to step 34 I will do a tutorial on how to do a dress shirt and cuffs but not in this video all right now step 34 tells us that we're gonna do a narrow hem all the way around the bottom of our shirt now because the bottom of our shirt is curved it can be kind of hard to do that unlike what we just did with the sleeve so I'm gonna show you a trick to make this a lot easier right now alright so we've got our shirt on an ironing board here and this is the entire length of the bottom and this is the wrong side of the fabric because we can see the inside of our seams right here so doing a freehand rolled hem on a curved edge like this can be kind of challenging so I'm going to show you a simple way to do this so that you get nice clean results now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna start at the center bottom and I'm gonna roll this up about half an inch or one seam allowance spread here and I'm gonna iron this I'm gonna iron it at that exact same all the way around from the center all the way to my left side and then I'm gonna start and do that all the way to my right side alright so that all looks really good and you just want to make sure it's nice and flat if you don't want any puckering or any ripples in your fabric at all so take your time if you need to and now since this is a rolled hem we pressed it once we're gonna roll this one more time just so that that is the same distance as our first press and I'm gonna do the exact same thing from the center all the way around to each edge just like we just did alright so now you should have something that looks like this all the way around the bottom and this just makes it so much easier to keep track of while we're sewing because what we have to do is we have to flip the whole shirt over and we're gonna be sewing on the right side of the shirt while this under here is tucked under so just like we did on the sleeves I'm gonna be kind of feeling this and just trying to do my best as stitch as close to the edge of the inside of this rolled hem so I don't think I'm gonna do a close up of this stitch because I think you guys get the idea of how to do a hem but I am going to just do this real quick alright I lied I'm gonna actually just do a close-up so anyway I've got the right side of my fabric here and if I look under I can see my rolled hem that we just pressed and trust me it makes it a lot easier if you are comfortable with free-handing this go for it but otherwise sometimes I still do this just to make sure that it turns out very polished so I am just gonna start on one end and I'm gonna do a stitch all the way until we run out of fabric okay so when you get to the end I've got a little extra fabric poking out so I'm just gonna trim that off along with my stitches and then on our starting end I am gonna do the same thing where I just kind of clean that up and we are all done with our bottom hem really quick it's normal to see a little bit of rippling like this after you do a hem like that so I'm just gonna press this nice and flat and that's gonna smooth everything out and then everything on both the outside and the inside are gonna look nice and clean now our hem is gonna look nice and clean and that is in good shape forever alright so now that we're done with our bottom hem we're gonna be doing the front band or the placket the collar and the collar band so first we're gonna start with the front band where the buttons and the buttonholes go so it's gonna tell you to turn over one edge of this by 3/8 of an inch and I'm not gonna do that yet I always do that after I sew it on to the actual shirt so I'm gonna show you how I do this alright so here's the left front edge of our shirt and here is the left front band of our shirt now there is a notch right here and right here so those are gonna match up so what I want to do is I'm gonna put these together so they're right sides together and you should know that because there should be interfacing on the back side of your band already alright so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to pin where these two notches match up first and then right where this curved edge of the band ends I want to match that up with the edge of the front of our shirt here because this is exactly where our stitch is gonna start and if we do it properly it's gonna look nice and even so I've got a pin here and here now the band is always gonna be longer than your shirt and that's totally okay and I'll explain why later but all we have to do is just make sure this is nice and smooth and even and that these raw edges are nice and flush so I'm gonna pin this all the way down to the bottom so now I'm gonna pin my other side alright so both of these are ready so I'm just gonna do a back stitch at the top do a straight stitch all the way down at a five-eighths of an inch seam allowance and then another back stitch at the bottom okay so we've got our band stitch into place which looks really good but I'd like to thin out this seam and I'll tell you why because what we're gonna end up doing is our band is gonna roll over like this and then we're gonna fold it in half eventually and you're gonna have that seam tucked on the inside and if it's really bulky in there when you sit down this is gonna pinch and it's gonna bubble up and it'd look really weird when you move around so I like to thin this out and I'm gonna show you how I do that all right now I don't want to cut this too close to the stitches because we need a little bit of seam left over to press to one side so what I usually do is I cut about halfway between the edge of the fabric and where the stitches are and I'm gonna do that all the way down so that I've got just a little bit less fabric to deal with when we end up kind of closing this up and finishing our front bands so now this is a little bit thinner which is gonna make this a lot easier and it's going to drape a little bit better when we finish our shirt now the next thing we want to do is this seam needs to be pressed towards the band itself because that's gonna end up getting hidden on the inside and this will make a lot more sense as we do the next step after this but basically I just want to press this whole seam and I'm going to kind of pull the band so that the fabric lays nice and flat while I'm doing this but I want to press that whole seam again I'm kind of spreading the fabric apart while I do this so that on the outside we've got a nice flat seam alright so now that that seam is pressed we're gonna flip the shirt over and we're going to be looking at the raw edge of our band right here now the previous step we skipped and I'd like to do this after just because it's a little bit easier so it told us to roll this over about 3/8 of an inch like that so that's about even with the scene that we trimmed and it wants us to press this into shape and I'm gonna do this all the way from the center all the way up to the top and then all the way to the bottom all right this is looking perfect so we've got our seam pressed in towards the band and then we've got this rolled over one time impressed all right so now what we want to do is take this edge and we're gonna fold this in half so it's just barely going past where those stitches were right there okay and I am going to press this with an iron so that we've got a good starting point here all right so now as i zoom out I'm gonna be following this edge so that we're folding this entire band in half so that it isn't just barely going past where the stitches of that seam were and I'm gonna press this in half all the way up to the top and then all the way down to the bottom make sure you do a really good job of pressing this so that it stays in really good shape while we're stitching this into place all right now as we take a closer look you should have something that looks like this and if I just barely pull this back you should see your stitches hiding right underneath that edge immediately so it should look like that and then on the outside of our garment it should look something like this where you can barely see a seam right there so that's exactly what we want all right now as we prepare this for sewing I'm gonna take the tip of a pin and I'm gonna put it right as close as I can to the edge of that folded over fabric I'm gonna push it through and lock that in place and I'm gonna leave the head of the pin pretty far away from the edge of that fabric now I'm gonna do this again one more time right here and we're gonna go all the way up to the top and all the way down to the bottom so that's this stays locked in place just like that so when you're done you should have something that's pinned in place all the way like this and I'm gonna leave the bottom open and I'm gonna show you why right now okay now the pattern itself does a terrible job of explaining how to finish the bottom of your band right here so I'm gonna explain it as simply as I can this is how it looked originally so what I'm gonna do is I'm going to open this up we're going to flip this over so it should look like that I'm gonna fold this in half so that this edge here matches up with this edge like that okay now I'm gonna put a pin through these layers right here right on the edge hopefully you can see that so it should look something like this this is the outside of the shirt and then the inside of the shirt should look like that and what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this over to my sewing machine and what we're gonna try to do is follow again the bottom of this hem we're gonna do a stitch right in line with that across all the layers of this all the way to the other side so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna flip this over and I'm gonna pull up my pin and hold this in place with my finger so what I'm gonna do is line up my needle so I know it's gonna match up with the line of this hem right here so I'm gonna do a back stitch on the outside edge first and then I'm going to move closer inside we're gonna stitch right up to where the bottom of the hem is I'm gonna do a double back stitch to make sure to make sure it stays nice and strong and then I'm gonna cut my thread alright now what I want to do is trim as close as I can to the stitches that we just did without cutting through them doesn't have to be like crazy close but pretty close so something like that should be fine and now since we're gonna be turning this right side out this top right point right here I'm gonna just barely trim off the top corner without cutting through those stitches to thin that out because we're gonna make a nice clean point in a moment so that's how you finish the bottom of your bands and we're gonna take this over to the table and I'm gonna show you why this made sense all right so here's what we just did and this looks really good so now what we want to do is we're going to turn this so it's all right side out and I've got this little seam turner here to help me get that corner nice and clean so now the bottom of our front bands are done and I'm gonna try to lay this flat alright so you can see where we had it pinned up to before and now that we've got this all nice and polished I'm going to press this into shape just like we did before with the rest of it and I'm just gonna finish pinning this like we did earlier alright so finally this thing is fully prepared the bottom is all squared up which looks great everything is pinned up properly so this is where we want to be alright so now let's flip our shirt over so we're gonna be looking at this from the right side of the fabric now so this is the front left of my shirt alright so here's the center bottom of our left front so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna do a straight stitch starting right where my fingertip is here we're gonna go on the inside of this seam all the way up to the top now I can see and feel where my pins are so I'm gonna pull my pins out as I'm sewing up here and we're gonna be sewing all the way up to the top of the front of our band here alright so now here's the inside of our shirt and the reason that we stitched the outside right along the inside of this front band is it's going to stitch through all these layers and it's gonna lock this in place so that you don't get any frayed edges and this is gonna look really clean on both the inside and the outside all right now I do want to show a close-up of how I do this so I'm gonna line up my needle with about an eighth of an inch from the right side of that seam and I'm gonna take my first pin out in advance because I don't want to run over that right away now I'm gonna start with a couple of slow stitches and then I'm gonna do a back stitch to make sure that looks good now I'm gonna kind of pull the fabric tight a little bit not too tight but a little bit towards me to make sure everything underneath stays nice and flush and I'm gonna sew this at about an eighth of an inch all the way up and when I see a pin like I see here I'm gonna reach under on my left side I'm gonna pull that out and I'm going to continue on I'm going to do this all the way until I get to the top all right now as I get to the top I'm gonna do a back stitch right before the edge and then just let it run all the way off trim my thread and we are done with the inside of that all right so here's the outside of what we just did and as I look at the inside I can tell that I caught that inside lining edge just perfectly all the way from top to bottom so that is exactly what you want to see there okay so the next step is for us to top stitch all the way from the outside edge all the way down to the bottom and then we're gonna pivot along the bottom and stitch into right here but sometimes you might see a little bit of rippling like I see right here so I'm gonna go and press this on my ironing board so that this all lays nice and flat and then we're gonna come back and I'll show you how to top stitch it alright so I just went and iron this so this is all nice and flat which is great because it's gonna make it a lot easier to top stitch now on the bottom left front I always start at this angle here where I'm going to be following the very bottom and this is all just decorative top stitch but this will help it hold its shape so I'm gonna do a few stitches along the bottom a couple of back stitches to keep it in place we're gonna go all the way to this bottom corner and then I'm gonna lift my foot do a pivot and now we're gonna stitch all the way up to the top when I'm doing this stitch I'm gonna try to stay as close to the edge as I possibly can because it's gonna give you a really polished look so if you need to go slow that's fine but I just want to make sure this stays nice and even and when you get to the top you don't have to do this part because the collar is gonna end up covering that up now from the bottom all the way up to the top we've got top stitch on either side which looks really good and everything on the inside is nice and clean so when I do the other side just because of the way the fabric sits I have to start at the top and then I work my way down to the bottom all right now as I get to the bottom I'm gonna lift my foot and do a pivot and then I'm going to stitch into the inside of our band here and do a back stitch just to lock that up and then cut our thread and clean up anything that is loose all right so now we got both sides top stitched and they should be locked in place and looking good so we are officially done with the front bands all right so the last thing we actually have to attach to the shirt is the color on the color stand now we don't need the color stand right now we're just going to be looking at the collar all right so first make sure that your non interface color is right side up so you should be able to see the pretty side of the fabric here and then we're gonna put the other interface piece of the collar right on top of that so that they're right sides together now these are right sides together so I am going to pin kind of the top corners first and then I'm gonna pin the actual corners of the color itself and then just to keep this thing together I always put a couple of pins in the center areas alright now this part is very important so we're gonna stitch at a 5/8 of an inch seam allowance from the top left corner right down to this corner here all the way across to this corner and then back up here do not sew this edge here closed because we need to flip this right side out when we're done so I'm not gonna do a close-up on this but I'm gonna go and stitch that just like we said okay so now on the collar I'm gonna trim this very very close to the stitches because as we turn this right side out we want the edges to be nice and crisp so I am gonna use my rotary cutter to trim that and then I'm going to do this long edge also alright now in the corners of our collar it's really important that we clip these corners as close as we can to those stitches without going through those stitches so I'm going to do that on both sides of the corners of my collar alright so now we have something that looks like this and all we want to do is just turn this whole thing so that it is right side out so I'm gonna flip it like that and when I get to where my pointy corners are I'm going to use my seam Turner to push that out as much as I can without pushing it through the fabric so that I've got a nice crisp point kind of like that and I'm going to do the same thing with the other side ok so now we've got our color turned red set out but it's not really wanting to stay in shape so we are going to press this into shape as best we can so basically I'm just gonna line up these raw edges of this open edge first and I'm gonna try to kind of wiggle the inside seam so that it is as flat as possible and it's kind of a trick where you can kind of roll the fabric back and forth between your fingers on a seam like that to make sure that it lays flat on the inside so that looks good there I'm gonna do the same thing over here on the right side alright so here is the point of our collar right here and I want to do a top edge stitch kind of like we did with our front band here so when I do my top stitch on this I'm gonna start at the top corner work my way to this corner work all the way around and then back up here and here you can sew this shut if you want to and just do it real close to the edge all right so now we have a collar that looks like this and all we have to do is put it into the collar stand then attach it to our shirt so let's talk about how to do that now to prepare our collar Stan you don't have to do anything with the interface side for right now but all we're gonna do is we're gonna take the straight edge of the color stand lining and we're gonna press this up by one seam alone so about 1/2 inch or 5/8 of an inch all the way across and it does kind of curve a little bit so do your best to make sure that it curves with the raw edge of the fabric keep in mind the wrong side of your fabric should be face-up on your ironing board when you roll this over alright so now to put our whole collar together what we're gonna do is move our color stand lining and I'm gonna flip the interface side over of the actual color stand so this should be right side up now I'm gonna match up the notches of my collar with the collar stand and I'm gonna pin those together it might be kind of hard to see the notches but I can see them very right here so I'm gonna pin those two double notches together first now as you can see the collar bends the opposite direction of the actual color stand so I have to kind of force this to follow that Bend which is not that hard to do it's not like doing a sleeve so I'm just gonna pin that all the way so that those edges are nice and flush with each other like that and now I'm just going to do the same thing on the other side all right so you should have something that looks like this and if you see that your collar is rippling at all don't worry about that that's totally okay and now the last part is we are gonna take the other half of our collar stand and we're gonna line this up with the interface part of our color stand and you're gonna want this so that the the side we pressed over is on top facing you now what we want to do is I'm going to pin this so that the left side of our two collar stands are pinned together and the right sides of our color stands are pinned together and then I'm just gonna try to feel where the other pins were and I'm gonna pin through all four layers and I'm going to do this all the way across the top all right now if there's any other pins on the inside I usually take those out just because they will kind of only get in the way as we're getting ready to sew this thing together all right now when you have everything lined up it should look like this we've got our collar stand lining on top we've got our completed collar in the middle and then underneath that we have our interfaced collar stand here so what we're gonna do is try to lay this flat and we're gonna do a stitch that starts here at a 5/8 of an inch seam alone so we're gonna go around this curve all the way across this entire thing and then we're gonna curve around this edge and end right where that fold is there take your pins out as you go so that you don't get any pleats and then I will explain how this is gonna work after we're done with that stitch all right so we should have a nice stitch that goes all the way around like that and now what I'm gonna do is very carefully trim my seam so it is pretty close to where those stitches were okay so here's how everything makes sense now so we're gonna turn this whole thing right side out so what you're gonna notice is the collar is gonna pop out like this and I'm gonna want this so that the interfaced part of the color stand is against my ironing board I'm gonna try to turn the corners of where the color stand are and then try to lay this as flat as I can now it's really important to try to lay the fabric as flat as you can because we're gonna iron this just like this so I'm gonna kind of start in the middle and I'm going to stretch the fabric so that we don't get any weird uneven pressure when we're pressing this into shape and because we turned over about half an inch of our collar stand lining you should be able to see plenty of the interface side on the bottom here are good once you've got that all pressed I like to flip this over and I want to press my collar just so that I can make sure that it's all flat and everything looks nice and clean there all right now our collar is pressed and it is ready so we can put this on our shirt right now all right so now lay your shirt down so that it is right-side up and you're looking at your neckline here and what I want to do is I'm going to fold this in half so that I can find the center middle of my back panel so if I fold this perfectly in half like that I'm gonna put a pin right through the center so I know where the exact center is so as I laid this flat and kind of open it up I've got my direct center point here then I'm gonna do the same thing with my collar where I'm going to fold it in half find the absolute center and I'm gonna put a pin through that as well so now what you want to do is you're gonna lay your interface side of your collar stand against that edge of the center back so that those two Center points are matched up perfectly I'm gonna hold these with my fingers pull out the pins and then I'm gonna pin through just the interface side of the collar stand and the back of the shirt okay so we have our center point of our collar pinned in place now I want to make sure that this point right here matches up with the edge of our front band right there because we're gonna start stitching right here and I want to make sure that's absolutely flush with our fabric so I'm gonna hold that with my fingers and I'm gonna put a pin through those layers just like that make sure you don't pin the lining down you're gonna need to pull this back so just make sure that you don't pin through that okay now kind of like with the sleeve this is gonna kind of Bend a little bit so I'm gonna pull these real tight together and I can tell these aren't matching up so what I want to do is kind of drag these two panels of fabric so that the raw edges match up with each other and again this is just the interface side not the lining side so those are pinned together now then I'm going to do the same thing between these two pins where I'm going to line up the raw edges there then I'm going to line up these raw edges right here alright so now we have the left side of the collar pin in place and I'm going to do the same exact thing on the right side where I'm going to start all the way over here in this corner and make sure those points match up and that I'm gonna do the same thing to pin this together all right so I know this looks kind of unusual and I am gonna do a close-up on how I do this stitch but we're gonna start over here and then we're gonna stitch just the interface side to the back panel all the way across and I'll show you how this works all right so doing the color is kind of a two-phase thing so what we're gonna do is I'm gonna take out my first pin and again let me hold this up I want to make sure that right in that little V if between those two layers of fabric that's where our stitch starts and I do not want to sew any of the color facing lining at all so I'm gonna start as close to that as I can I'm gonna do a little front and back stitch off the edge now as I do this I want to stay on a 5/8 of an inch seam alone so I can kind of peel this lining back which makes it really easy it's an organ - so the interface part of our color right to our shirred and that lining isn't gonna get in the way at all so I'm just gonna go all the way to the other side and I'm gonna remove pins as I go along okay now as I come up to the other end here it's gonna be hard to keep the lining out of the way but what I want to do I hope you can see this is I'm gonna take out my last pin and hold it with my finger like that and I want my last stitch to go right through right where the lining connects to the interface part do a little back stitch and then go all the way off and if you get this perfectly you're gonna have this absolutely seamless finish on where your collar matches the rest of the parts of your shirt and it looks really good now I just noticed an error that I made and I'm really happy this happened during this tutorial because I wanted to show you guys how to fix this if this happened so the I've got this weird pleat right here and actually if I show you the outside of the collar it's gonna make this weird kind of awkward pleat and we don't want that and I'm gonna show you how to fix that right now all you have to do to fix one of these little pleats like this is take a seam ripper and just pop the stitch right where it's pleading right there now I'm just gonna kind of tug on the fabric and it's gonna start to kind of unravel some of those stitches right there now I want to pop out as many stitches as I need to so that I can make sure that this is gonna lay flat all right so I just took out about maybe two or three inches worth of stitches right there and now I can actually see this on the other side where I know it's laying flat so all I have to do now is just line this up with my sewing machine where those stitches ended I'm gonna do a quick little stitch and a back stitch I'm gonna make sure that there's nothing else underneath this fabric so that we've got a nice clean stitch I'm gonna pull this fairly tight and I'm gonna stitch until it lines up with our other stitches and then do a back stitch all right so here's our little recovery stitch which lays nice and flat and if I turn this right side out I no longer see any pleats right there which looks really good so if you get any issues with your sleeves or your collar it's very simple to kind of correct that error all right so now that we have our collar sewn in we have to press this one more time and then we get to do our top stitch so let's go press this all right so we're looking at the inside of our shirt and I got my lining is still nice and loose up here and we've got a seam right here that I actually want to keep the seam at that length because it's gonna give some structure to our collar stand however there is one part I want to thin out a little bit so this part of the seam right here is really thick and our lining has to cover it in a curved way so what I'm gonna do is pull all of the lining away from this and I'm going to trim this seam kind of in a rounded way without cutting through any of those stitches so that it should look a little bit thinner like that what we're gonna do is we're gonna end up tucking this seam under and that lining so it's gonna sit kind of like that and then we're gonna end up pressing this and stitching over that so you can't see any of those seams kind of like we did with the the front bands here so again this is the other side and I'm gonna just trim very close to those stitches and kind of round off that seam so that it will hide underneath the lining just a little bit more easily okay now what we're gonna do is we're going to lift up the lining so that it's not in the way and I'm gonna take my iron and I'm gonna press the seam up towards the top of the shirt we're gonna do that all the way from left to right okay good so that's all love and if this starts to wrinkle down here don't worry about that because we can iron that later but now I'm gonna pull my lining down and I'm going to make sure that this all kind of looks the way it's supposed to look when it's finished okay now just like we did with the front bins I'm gonna take the folded over lining and I'm just gonna barely cover those stitches like we did before I'm gonna take a pin and put it right through the edge of that folded fabric through all the layers and I'm going to push this through all the layers to hold that in place like that and I'm going to pin this all the way to the left and right edges of this collar all right this pinned all the way across where that lining is in place of what we're gonna do is I'm gonna flip this over we're gonna take this over to our sewing machine and I'm gonna stitch this lower edge pulling out my pins as I go along just like we did with the front bands so we're gonna do that all the way across alright so again this is one of those top stitches that's gonna lock the lining in place so I've got my seam right here and I'm going to be stitching about an eighth of an inch to the right of that to try to lock the lining in place so I'm just gonna start by doing a little front and back stitch right there and we are gonna push forward and I'm at about yeah about an eighth of an inch from the edge of the seam right there so I'm actually gonna keep my left arm underneath my shirt so I can pull out the pins as I'm going here all right now as I get to my edge I'm gonna do the same back stitch and then run all the way off cut my thread now I'm going to check to see how this looks alright so as you can see on the inside I've got this so that it is actually covering all of the lining all the way across so this is completely sealed on the inside it's not perfectly clean but on the outside it looks absolutely perfect so that's what we're looking for all right now I'm going to take this over and I'm gonna press this so it's nice and flat and then we're gonna do our final top stitch alright so for the final top stitch on our color stand I like to line it up with these stitches that we put on the front of our shirt so I'm gonna kind of line up my needle with where those stitches end do a little front and back stitch and then I'm going to very carefully follow the curve of the color stand I'm going to edge stitch as close as I can to where the color stand ends and where the color begins and as I'm coming around this curve here I'm gonna try to do the same thing where I'm gonna match up my stitch with these stitches on the right side of our front opening here do a little back stitch cut my thread and we are completely done with the construction of the shirt itself right now okay so the collar is completely done this looks really good and there's just one last thing that we have to do where I am gonna turn my shirt upside down and I'm looking at the right side of the shirt and all I'm gonna do is turn the collar over just barely before where the collar stand is and I'm gonna press this said that the collar is going down towards the shirt unless you want a color that's popped up at all times I'm just gonna press this into shape you don't have to sew it or anything this is just a keep it in the proper shade now that we have our collar press you should have something that looks something like this and the last thing we have to do is just put on our buttons and buttonholes it's important to mention that traditionally if you're a man buttons go on the right side of your shirt and buttonholes go on the left side so I'm gonna show you how to set up for doing buttons and buttonholes right now so this is the left opening of my shirt and this is where my buttonholes are gonna go so I'm going to line up the pattern of my band with this edge of my shirt and this pattern has a place that tells you where every button and buttonhole will go all the way along here so all I have to do is just kind of draw a straight line up from there and I'm gonna make little marks with chalk in my shirt everywhere that it says to do a buttonhole okay so hopefully you can see all my white chalk marks here and this is where my buttonholes are gonna go now I know that my buttonholes are gonna start here and they're gonna go down the shirt about an inch all the way down the shirt so when I do my button markings I want to make sure it's right in the middle of those and I'll show you how I do that alright now to transfer my chalk marks to the other side instead of using my patterns since I already have these marked here I know where they're gonna be so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go about maybe a quarter inch down from where my original marking was because I know that's where my buttons can need to go so I'm making chalk marks again about a quarter inch or so lower than where my buttonholes are gonna start so these are not going to be perfectly even but everything is going to work out just perfectly again just as a close-up I know my buttonholes gonna start here and go down to about here so my button marking is gonna fit right between where that buttonholes gonna go that's why I do it this way all right so now it's time to do our buttons and buttonholes which is the final step of making a shirt thankfully I've already shot a tutorial video on how to machine sew buttons and buttonholes into fabrics so if you click this link right here it will take you to a video that I made that's gonna teach you how to do that onto your shirt now if you've already seen that video or you already know how to do buttons and buttonholes just hang out for one second and I am gonna finish my shirt all right so my shirt is all done and I cleaned up all my loose threads and we got our buttons and buttonholes on which looked great and I wanted to just mention that every time I make a shirt I keep an extra copy of the breast pocket just for fun so just as an example this is my stack of all of my extra breast pockets that I've got collected this is actually the shirt I'm wearing right now but if your guy's shirt didn't turn out well I just wanted to show that you know I've made a lot of shirts and I've got a lot of practice so if your student turn out perfectly don't beat yourself up but keep working at it and also I recommend using lots of fun fabrics like these because there are some really cool fabrics out there okay so I am all done with my shirt I haven't even tried this on so I'm gonna put this on and I want to see how it looks all right so this is my first official fitting test and I think this turned out pretty well and my collar is nice and clean I like my embroidery the pocket looks good something I want to mention is I did do a video on how to tailor a men's t-shirt and this is a little baggy on me so my next video I'm gonna show you how to tailor a button-down shirt just like this one so that it's gonna look a little bit more fitted and kind of like this or something like that so you can take any pre-existing button-down shirt and make it tailored and fitted to fit you perfectly I would like to thank all of you for watching this tutorial and all the little spin-off tutorials I've been making it's been a lot of fun teaching you guys how to make certain projects and I'm really happy and all of your comments have been so wonderful so thank you so much for all your support if any of you end up making a shirt like this and you'd like to share with me on Twitter or Instagram please tag me at tock custom and put something like hashtag tock shirts or something like that so that I can keep track of what you guys are making and celebrate what we're all doing together if you have any questions about this video or any other videos you'd like to see please let me know in the comments otherwise thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next video where we tailor this shirt

Channel: Tock Custom

Views: 157,168

Rating: 4.9597344 out of 5

Keywords: how to sew, sewing for beginners, sewing tutorial, embroidery, overlock machine, serger, sewing, men's clothing, how to make clothes, tock custom, tockcustom, sewing man, sewing jesus, brother sewing machine, heavy duty sewing machine, how to use a sewing machine, how to make a button down shirt, button down shirt tutorial, button down shirt, how to sew buttons, how to make a shirt, men's shirt tutorial, Mccall's 6044, how to sew a rolled hem, how to sew a collar, custom shirt

Id: AKA7FnpcloU

Length: 65min 31sec (3931 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 13 2020