Lessons On Longview: How to Make a *raglan* Shirt

Once I get an idea in my head it is awfully hard for me to get it out. I had just such an idea about what I wanted Haden's birthday shirt to look like. It was a raglan shirt and I could not find one! Sure, they have them at Academy but they are too big, they have them at various wholesale shirt sites online but not in his size, and they have one on Old Navy's website in his size but I'm not paying $7.50 for shipping and when one's husband is still without a job one does not have the pleasure of ordering $50 worth of clothing to score free shipping.

So, I was going to settle. Settle for a plain white long sleeved tee from Target that was $6. Overpriced in my opinion. I decided to try Old Navy in person. Maybe someone had returned the raglan that I wanted. That didn't happen but I did find an orange Halloween shirt marked down to 47 cents and a white short sleeved pocket tee for $4. It had pink spots on the inside of the collar so they marked it damaged and gave it to me for $2. The wheels started turning.

Here is how I made the "raglan" shirt.

First I ripped the pocket off the white tee.

with pocket

no pocket

Then I ripped out the sleeves from both shirts. All of this was done with a seam ripper. My hands hurt for a long time =)

Then I laid the sleeves out and thought for a minute about what to do next.

Now you want to turn the shirt inside out, but not the sleeves. You are going to put the sleeve inside the arm hole with the right sides together. So the arm of the sleeve will be inside the shirt. Pin the edges together. I lined up the seams on the bottom of the arm hole and sleeve and pinned from there.

Notice that it looks like mine isn't lined up all that well. The sleeves were from a 2T shirt and the shirt is 12-18 months. I just made sure the top and the bottom were lined up and then made it even around with a bit of hangover. I followed the line of holes left from ripping out the previous sleeves. Do this very carefully and make sure you don't accidentally sew the arm hole shut or catch anything that doesn't need to be sewn.

voila! I went back and trimmed off the extra orange material from the sleeves on the inside and zigzagged the raw edges. Then I decided the collar needed to be orange too so I ripped the collar out of the Halloween shirt. And then I cheated.

Instead of ripping out the collar from the white shirt I just put the orange collar over it. Since it is folded in half I lined up one side on the outside of the shirt and then brought the other half over and lined it up on the inside of the shirt. I did 2 lines of straight stitching to secure it and then to help the raw edges from fraying too bad I zigzagged around the bottom.