Boys Oxford Shirt with Wooden Buttons

Pub­lished 12/08/2013

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Striped Oxford Shirt for Boys

Last year, I picked up this blue striped design­er fab­ric from Mood Fab­rics in New York City.

I want­ed to buy  a shirt­ing cot­ton that was good qual­i­ty, unique and cute for lit­tle boy. Mood had such a large selec­tion of shirt­ing cot­tons that at first it seemed impos­si­ble to choose one fab­ric. But as soon as I saw this blue and brown striped fab­ric, I knew imme­di­ate­ly it was the fab­ric I want­ed for the project!

Not only did I want to make Robert a cute oxford shirt, but I want­ed to prac­tice my shirt mak­ing skills before I began draft­ing and sewing  the cus­tom shirts I planned to make for my dad and friends. If I make a mis­take with Robert’s shirt it would only cost me one yard of fab­ric rather than 3 yards of fabric!

Not only did I love this fab­ric and think it would be real­ly cute on Robert, I also decid­ed to chal­lenge myself with the stripes.

As you can see, I was able to line up all the lines per­fect­ly on the pock­et and cen­ter front 🙂

For Robert’s shirt, I used Kwik Sew Pat­tern 3146.

Kwik Sew Pat­terns are more expen­sive than the oth­er pat­terns found in stores, but I think they have the best pat­tern instruc­tions on the mar­ket. (So if you’re sewing a new type of gar­ment, I would rec­om­mend using a Kwik Sew!)

I took my time dur­ing this project so, I don’t remem­ber hav­ing any issues along the way except for the cuffs.

For the cuffs, I used a dif­fer­ent fin­ish­ing tech­nique than what the Kwik Sew direc­tions gave. Instead, I used the cuff tech­nique Claire Sha­ef­fer gives in her Cou­ture Sewing Tech­niques Book. I tried the Kwik Sew tech­nique first and real­ly did­n’t like the results, so I tried the tech­nique in Sha­ef­fer­’s book and had much bet­ter results.

After fin­ish­ing the cuffs (and being very pleased with the results), I made a very dumb mis­take with but­ton­holes on the cuffs!

After sewing a but­ton­hole on the first cuff, I real­ized I stitched the wrong side of the cuff vent! ( I did the same thing for the oth­er side, so that the cuffs looked the same.)  At first I was­n’t hap­py about this mis­take, but after see­ing it on Robert I did­n’t mind it at all!

Robert loves bea­gles, so I orig­i­nal­ly looked around for some cute dog but­tons. I could­n’t find any­thing I liked, so instead I end­ed up using these wood­en buttons.

I used Pel­lon Shir-Tai­lor Fusible Inter­fac­ing for the col­lar and cuffs.

Robert’s moth­er said that the shirt wash­es well and she has­n’t had any issues wash­ing the shirt.

So what’s next? Men’s suits!

Hope­ful­ly soon, I’ll find time to sew a tod­dler’s sports jack­et for Robert and prac­tice my suit mak­ing skills!

Thank you Robert for the photos!