Shirt Design 37: Roar of Pride (Finished Object)
I’ve never gone to a Pride parade or festival before, primarily because I felt that as a straight white men, Pride was Not For Me (which was fine, I’m okay with things being Not For Me since there are plenty of things that are For Me in this world).
This is changing this year, as my daughter and one of her friends want to go, and we’re the parents who are more eager to take them.
Of course that means I need a shirt to wear to Pride, but since I don’t make one-use shirts, it also needs to be a shirt I can wear to work at an elementary school in a county that voted for Trump.
After doing some searches for fabric patterns, the Rainbow Dragon shirt came to be.
Features:
Fabric Pattern: This is a Spoonflower pattern of rainbow-colored dragon scales.
“Buttons”: I think these are technically mermaid scale iridescent Cabochons, but they look great as tiny “dragon eggs” glued onto snaps.
General Construction: This shirt was made using the “Simon” design from FreeSewing.org. I modified the design to have a single piece back instead of yokes, used a small facing panel instead of a collar stand to obscure the seam allowance from the collar and top of the shirt, and modified the pattern to use short sleeves.
Lesson learned from Shirt Design 37 - Remember Your Why: As I make more things and get better at it, people ask me if or when I’m going to start selling shirts or other sewing designs. My answer has always been that I think trying to monetize sewing will take the joy out of it for me, and I do think that’s true, but there’s sort of a deeper dive into that. I still make a lot of mistakes that leave minor evidence on the finished garment that I’m willing to *wear* but not *sell*. For example, on this shirt, I had to reattach the collar three times - once because I put the collar pieces on in the wrong order, once because I folded the shirt to install the collar incorrectly, and once because after all that I discovered that I had miscut the collar too wide and needed to take everything apart and shorten it. As a result, the seam where the collar meets the shirt has enough needle holes that it resembles that picture of the plane with the red dots on the wings that accompanies articles about survivorship bias. It meets my standards for what I’ll wear, but I won’t expect someone else to accept it. So this will remain a hobby for me to make things for me and my family, which is a comfortable place for me, and reinforcing that in my mind is healthy.