Present Joys

When the Mountain Goats came to Columbus in april, I gave Peter Peter Hughes (the band’s very steezy bass-player) one of my handmade bow ties. A few weeks ago, he sent me a very kind email thanking me for the gift. And now I’ve spotted some pictures of him wearing the tie at tMG shows! I couldn’t be more thrilled.

Huge thanks to my pal Valerie for finding the photos!!

So, after several weeks of mediocre results in shirtmaking, I’ve finally arrived at something I’m really proud of. I remade my entire draft after last week’s shirt, because I was not totally satisfied, and I think my pattern is vastly improved this week.

The fabric is Kaffe Fassett’s “shot cotton”, which I got from Sew to Speak for $9/yd. It’s extremely fine, and a great pleasure to work with. I was running out of white mercerized cotton thread, so I opted for this weird light-brown cotton thread I got at Banasch’s. It’s deadstock thread—old, and very fine quality. The effect of brown thread on yellow is nice. I used plastic brownish “horn” buttons instead of pearl.

As you can see, I made the inner collar stand out of the cool polka-dot fabric from my worst-fitting shirt to date. I think it looks really nice with the yellow… there’s a silver lining here!

I snapped this picture of the wrinkly, incomplete shirt while I still had daylight, but I am happy to report that it is 100% finished, with all its buttons attached and a hand-rolled hem. I’m going to wear it tomorrow with other flame-colored clothing in honor of Pentecost.

And one more note: I’ll be out of town for the better part of the next two weeks. This afternoon I cut out all the parts for two new shirts, but I won’t have the time to construct them until the end of the month. So “one shirt every week” will be on a hiatus until then. Stay tuned!