Fairfield Sew-along: Cut into your fabric

First:
I forgot to announce during our post on choosing your fabric that Stonemountain & Daughter Fabrics has generously offered a 15% discount off of your entire order in their shop. Use the code: FAIRFIELD15 I'm sorry that I failed to mention this earlier since some of you have probably already made your fabric purchases! In case you have, let me point out that you can use this discount for other projects too - it applies to their entire shop. Thanks for offering this code to us Stonemountain & Daughter!Second:
We have another free pattern add-on download ready for you! It contains a variety of cuff shapes to add to the Fairfield Button-up along with the necessary instructions.
Okay, let's get to the sew-along now:




One Way Layout:
If your print has an obvious 'up' and 'down' you will need to place all of your pattern pieces facing in a single direction. Our cutting layouts do not need any adjustments to work for one way prints! Many shirt patterns suggest that you cut your cuffs and collars with the long edge of each piece aligned to the grain/selvage. I placed the pattern pieces with the short edges aligned to the grain/selvage so that the flowers or birds (or whatever directional print you have) face the same direction as the sleeves. The only piece that is not placed in this manner is the under collar - it is so thin that you will likely not be able to see the direction of the print and it is also mostly hidden by the collar. If you prefer, though, you are welcome to rotate it on your fabric so it's longest edge runs from selvage to selvage.
Design Placement:
Large scale prints with motifs that are several inches wide often need a bit of special treatment and extra fabric. If you are attempting to match the print (across center front, for example), keep in mind that the design repeats less often than a small scale print. According to my favorite sewing reference book, Reader's Digest, Complete Guide to Sewing, a general rule of thumb to figure out how much extra fabric you will need is: "The length of one print repeat should be added for each yard of fabric called for."


Matching:
Common choices for men's shirts include vertical stripes, horizontal stripes or plaids. If you have chosen one of these you will need to do at least a small amount of pattern matching. In my opinion, there are three levels of pattern matching:
- You can take a very careful approach to matching that creates the illusion of a seamless garment by continuing the print across two or more pattern pieces. In the photo above you can see that I cut the yoke and shirt back to carefully make the distance between the dots continue evenly across the seam line.
- You can choose one element of the print to match and ignore the rest - This is what I normally do. It creates just enough harmony to make the shirt look thought out while preventing you from loosing your mind due to the frustration of cutting out and sewing perfectly matched printed pieces! I find, for example, that a plaid or other grid style print still looks nice if only the vertical pattern is matched, leaving the horizontal pattern to position itself more or less randomly (or vice versa). Of course, this is a matter of taste- you might not feel the same way about plaids and grid type prints.
- You can choose one main area of the garment (across the center front of the shirt) to match and ignore all other areas of the garment. As you can see in my quick plaid shirt below, the yoke, cuffs and sleeve placket are not matched but the center front is (or at least it did match until I placed the snaps in the wrong position lol).


Regardless of which 'level' of pattern matching you hope to achieve, here are some guidelines based on the style of print you are working with: Stripes: Horizontal stripes usually require extra fabric while vertical stripes do not. This is only a loose guideline - if you are working with very wide vertical stripes, you may need to get more fabric than the pattern calls for because you will need to spread pattern pieces farther apart. Plaids: Even plaids generally take less fabric to match than uneven plaids. When working with plaids you must pay attention to both lengthwise and crosswise matching. Even plaid:


Now let's move on to the specifics of print placement. The Procedure: This is the order of events when you would like to create a perfectly pattern matched garment. I've adapted these from my Reader's Digest, Complete Guide to Sewing. Stop at step 1 for vertical stripes, at step 2 if you aren't a perfectionist (that's where I'm stopping today!), and at step 3 if you enjoy a good puzzle and want to put your pattern matching skills to the test!





If all of that has you a touch overwhelmed, approach your printed fabric in a different way - here is how I like to think about cutting it out if I don't feel like messing around with much matching. A couple tricks to reduce frustration (and as a bonus you might use less shirt fabric!): Men's shirts present some great opportunities for playing with prints so that you don't have to perfectly match them and so that you don't have to waste so much fabric between each pattern piece (arguably the worst part of matching prints).

- Cut details on the bias - the pocket and sleeve placket can both be placed randomly on the fabric at a 45 degree angle so that you can utilize some fabric scraps rather than perfectly matching them to the chest and sleeve pieces.
- Add a center back seam to the yoke (don't forget to add a seam allowance) - this way you can cut it on the bias to create a fancy chevron effect. You will only need to match the small vertical center back seam instead of needing to match the long horizontal seam between the yoke and the shirt back.
- Only cut one yoke and collar stand and two cuffs from your main fabric. Use a contrast fabric (possibly from your scrap bin) to cut the second yoke and collar stand as well as the remaining two cuffs. This way you will have more yardage for pattern matching the exterior of the shirt and you will have a contrast fabric on the interior of the shirt (which can give a shirt great hanger appeal!). Here is a very old shirt - my first button-up! - that I cut in this manner (but not because I was matching plaid obviously):

To wrap things up, here are a couple of my favorite resources for matching plaids and stripes:
- An in-depth Seamwork Magazine article on matching plaids and stripes
- A great series about plaid fabrics at Really Handmade. This post is about uneven plaids, the rest of the posts can be accessed through links at the bottom of the article.
- A nice overview about working with plaids with member projects as inspiration over on Craftsy.
- Tilly's tips for sewing with stripes - this is a great post if you want to take a step back so that you aren't so overwhelmed and just focus on the basics of pattern matching.
Comments
Charlotte Vlek said:
oops, obviously this is not a post on fitting! Referring to Tuesday’s post :)
ThreadTheory said:
That’s a great point, thanks Charlotte! I find it really helps to draw in seam allowances when I am pattern matching so I don’t get confused by angled seam allowance corners!
Charlotte Vlek said:
Thanks for another great post on fitting! I was impatient and already cut into my plaid fabric… Something that might be helpful for others matching plaids is to keep in mind that the seam allowances of the front and back pieces are not equal, meaning that if you align the top edges of the pattern pieces (under the arm hole), this doesn’t make the plaids match up. I think you have to place the front pattern piece about 0.5 cm lower than the back pattern piece.