Winner's Tutorial: A Henley Collar

Thanks so much for your votes everyone, I am so excited to have won this week for a look I was so excited about! (especially with all the fantastic work I was up against!)

For my tutorial I decided to talk about the henley collar, and stripe matching in a knit fabric. 

It's really easy to have stripes stretch out of alignment with knits, especially since the fabrics tend to stretch out at different rates depending on what's by the feed dogs, and what's by the presser foot.  

 I began by fusing regular fusible interfacing to the back of my fabric, just in the neck area.

 Because I wanted the buttons to be centered, I cut the split off center by an inch.

 next I fused interfacing to the back of the strip I wanted to use for the placket in the collar,

 and then sewed it down to the shirt front so only the green stripe showed. I tapered the seam to being very narrow in the middle of the V, just barely catching the shirt fabric there. 

 The beige stripe is the only thing showing on the inside, I serged along this edge to make sure the edges were clean from the inside.

 Next I top stitched the placket to the wider side of the shirt front, and sewed along the bottom right along the stripe line. 

 and then folded the other half up and top stitched 1/4 inch above the green stripe. The collar is added and top stitched as you would add any collar, except for the split in the front,

 that I folded back and hand stitched down. as soon as everything was put together, I peeled off all of the excess fusible interfacing from the shirt, and cut it away.

 I added buttons and buttonholes to finish the whole thing off. 

 My tip for lining up the side and sleeve stripes,  is to take the time to hand baste them right near the seam allowance line. I make sure I stitch in and out of every lining up point while checking both sides to be sure that it is exactly lined up. I know it takes extra time, but I think the final product is worth the extra 20 minutes.

 as you can see, the basting keeps everything together, and you just pull it out at the end, and the shirt stretches as usual! 

I hope that this tutorial is helpful in getting those little details (like matched up stripes,) to be an easy but important detail in your sewing!

Thank you so much for having me, and I would love it if you would check out my blog cathgrace for some other fun ideas (and I'm excited about the rest of the competition, and seeing the brilliant work of the other competitors!!!) 

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