Patternmaking: Basic Tee, Part II

  

I spent this morning working on a muslin of my basic tee pattern out of a scrap of jersey I had left over from the show.  I've already tweaked the fit a bit by grading the bottom out 3/8", and haven't decided yet what I'm going to do about the fold of extra fabric in the lower back.  I have a feeling that if I slashed and spread up the center back, it would help, since it looks like the pattern is the right width at my waistline, but is bunching up because there's not enough width to cover my butt.  (For lack of better phrasing.)  I've definitely noticed that this jersey has much less horizontal stretchiness than the other fabrics I'm planning to use, so the fit will change as I start to use them.  I'm going for negative ease in the bust, just a touch of positive ease in the waist, and a lovely hip-skimming amount of positive ease in the hip, which will be greatly affected by the stretchiness and bounce-back of the fabric, so I'll just have to wait until I'm working in the final fabric to see how this pattern drapes and fits.

 

It's funny that my initial thought was that the body would be the easy part, and the sleeves would give me problems, because: holy range of motion, Batman!  I'm pretty impressed by the fit on this sleeve on the first try.  After copying the sleeve pattern, I changed the shape of the sleeve cap and added an extra 1/8" on each side of the underarm so that it would fit the armhole without any ease.  There's definitely bunching in the back of the underarm, but I'm trying to suppress my need for everything to fit perfectly when it's not in motion, because arm rotation is pretty important in a t-shirt, and as it stands, there's the perfect amount of ease to move my shoulders and arms around.

I also opted to baste this muslin together the way I'm planning to sew the final garment: shoulder seams first, sleeve set in flat, and side and underarm seams sewn up in one go.  Setting in sleeves in the round is, in my opinion, a total pain in the ass, so I decided to borrow a production trick.

Next up is serging the thing together at the shoulders, figuring out the hem treatment at the neckline, setting in the sleeves and sewing up the side seams, and finishing the bottom and sleeve hems.  Then onto real fabric!