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Turning a collar
I unpicked the collar of my new (second-hand) shirt in order to 'turn' it; what I hadn't realised was that this process is designed to work on a dress shirt with the buttonhole on a separate collar stand, and this one is a soft single-piece collar. What this article, for instance, doesn't tell you is that if you unpick "the whole collar along the seam where it attaches to the top of the shirt" and reverse it left to right, the button and button-hole will end up on the opposite side to all the other buttons on the shirt. Which isn't just an aesthetic issue, but means that you physically can't do it up because the top of the shirt then needs to overlap in the opposite direction; the button needs to be on the underneath, and it finds itself on the top!
So after re-stitching the entire collar on both sides with tiny invisible slip stitches (I didn't backstitch it, because that would have made lining the two pieces up infinitely more difficult -- and I can't even imagine how you would manage to wedge an opened-out collar piece under the foot of a sewing machine in order to reproduce the original seam line. Hand-stitching is not a method of self-torture endured by 're-enactors' for the sake of spurious authenticity, as Internet bloggers appear to believe; it's a useful tailoring skill that makes handling awkward seams much, much easier), I sewed the button back on, and then found that I simply couldn't fasten the garment when I tried it on. I couldn't see any alternative to cutting a new buttonhole on the side where the button used to be, through all the multiple layers of fabric, and sewing up the old one so that I could fix the button over it.
The buttonhole was surprisingly successful; I overstitched it lightly all round before beginning the buttonhole stitch, in order to keep the layers from moving, and did try to check that I'd pierced through approximately the same distance from the slit on top and bottom, as the tendency is for the underside of the buttonhole to fail to catch the under layer of fabric properly. So I think I now have a functioning shirt. I do wonder how well the slip-stitching will stand up in the wash....
At least this one is a reasonably 'busy' neutral pattern. I'd forgotten how quickly the necks of pale-coloured shirts show the dirt -- I usually try to make them do two days if they haven't been sweated into, but the pink one had a grey ring round it after only a few hours' wear, albeit hours spent cycling on busy main roads full of tyre-dust! (It makes you wonder what that stuff does to cyclists' lungs, given the mess it makes of their necks.)
So after re-stitching the entire collar on both sides with tiny invisible slip stitches (I didn't backstitch it, because that would have made lining the two pieces up infinitely more difficult -- and I can't even imagine how you would manage to wedge an opened-out collar piece under the foot of a sewing machine in order to reproduce the original seam line. Hand-stitching is not a method of self-torture endured by 're-enactors' for the sake of spurious authenticity, as Internet bloggers appear to believe; it's a useful tailoring skill that makes handling awkward seams much, much easier), I sewed the button back on, and then found that I simply couldn't fasten the garment when I tried it on. I couldn't see any alternative to cutting a new buttonhole on the side where the button used to be, through all the multiple layers of fabric, and sewing up the old one so that I could fix the button over it.
The buttonhole was surprisingly successful; I overstitched it lightly all round before beginning the buttonhole stitch, in order to keep the layers from moving, and did try to check that I'd pierced through approximately the same distance from the slit on top and bottom, as the tendency is for the underside of the buttonhole to fail to catch the under layer of fabric properly. So I think I now have a functioning shirt. I do wonder how well the slip-stitching will stand up in the wash....
At least this one is a reasonably 'busy' neutral pattern. I'd forgotten how quickly the necks of pale-coloured shirts show the dirt -- I usually try to make them do two days if they haven't been sweated into, but the pink one had a grey ring round it after only a few hours' wear, albeit hours spent cycling on busy main roads full of tyre-dust! (It makes you wonder what that stuff does to cyclists' lungs, given the mess it makes of their necks.)