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I finished updating my favorite t-shirt patterns blog post and realized that I had left out a few patterns that I really love. I don’t actually make it the way the pattern shows, but it’s a really good base for what I want a good tee to look like. There is one very small adjustment I make to the shoulder length (which I did to the black shirt, and the pink striped shirt), and you can read about it in this blog post. Many of these are made in my favorite types of fabrics for t-shirts, and you can read all about them in this blog post.

But one day, Dallas was cooking some chicken with his brand new button up shirt that I had just made him, and some of the grease was popping onto his clothes. I used the Avery Apron from Sew a Little Seam (free with her newsletter subscription) for Braden’s apron, and then for Dallas’ and mine After I finished making the kitchen aprons, Dallas really wanted a shop apron for when he does projects in the garage (read: If you give your husband a cooking apron…he’ll probably want a shop apron to go with it. I remembered that I had some black twill canvas fabric that I thrifted in Santa Barbara, and Dallas really wanted cool topstitching.

I haven’t been to the thrift store very much since the pandemic started, so when I found these, I didn’t realize that I wouldn’t be able to try them on. I got to browsing YouTube and found this video on how to take-in the waist on jeans, and it was exactly what I needed! In the video I watched, I think the woman is actually fixing really nice jeans (with flat felled seams), but these jeans are on the cheap side, so to finish the seam I just had to press the seam to one side and topstitch. I got a little distracted at the beginning (thanks children) and unpicked the wrong belt loop, and then one of my serger needles broke when I was serging the seam – but other than that, it went pretty smoothly!

I used the Bonn Shirt as the main pattern, but to get the boxy shape and loose feel that my RTW shirt had, I also used the Key Largo Top by Hey June. The Key Largo is my favorite basic woven tee pattern, and doing a mashup with the Bonn Shirt worked perfect! Teri Dodds has a blog post a couple of years ago about how she lowered the rise of her Free Range Slacks, and she linked to this blog post about common pant alterations. The pattern is meant for linen fabric and this fabric isn’t quite as rigid, so I think that played a part in these feeling a little larger on me too.