Striped T-shirt - Another Butterick 6258

October has been a very busy month for me, which has had an impact on my sewing and my blog, but after a break of several weeks here I am again, and its good to be back. At the beginning of the month both of my older sons went back to university for the new academic year. They are both studying on the same city and after a family day out involving two car loads of belongings, they are both settled in well. The house seems very quiet without them around and I have gone back to using my smaller pans to cook. There is also significantly less washing to do but this doesn't seem to have freed up much more sewing time. 

On 12th October my parents celebrated their 60th wedding anniversary with a small tea party for friends and family. They received a card from the queen to congratulate them for reaching this amazing milestone. 

Almost immediately after the anniversary party it was half term here so we went away for a short break in Somerset with our youngest son. We stayed in a lovely cottage on a farm near to the small village of Bicknoller. The UK caught the tail end of storm Ophelia while we were away. We travelled down to Somerset with an eerie orange light in the sky and initially had very mild weather followed by some rain but despite the uncertain weather we have a really good break.

Now that things are back to normal I have resumed sewing and have lots of projects panned as usual. While I was out doing a pre-university shop I was tempted by some interesting striped fabric that I thought would make a nice long sleeved T-shirt. I liked the burgundy stripe and I didn't notice at the time that this was a border print. The coloured stripe is green on one side of the fabric graduating to burgundy. I had just enough of this fabric to use the green stripes around the bottom of the T-shirt front and back,  but not enough to include green stripes on the sleeves.

I used Butterick 6528, which I have used twice before to make long sleeved T-shirts, here and here. It is a simple and reliable pattern which sews up quickly. The Reindeer T-Shirt hasn't been worn so much over the summer months but my Aqua T-Shirt is a good friend that I  wear all the time.

I used lots of pins to make sure that I matched the stripes when I was cutting out the front and back pieces on the fold and I cut the two sleeves separately to make sure that the stripes matched. I pinned through each of  the narrowest white stripes to ensure a good match at the seams before stitching them and this worked well. I am especially pleased with the way the stripes match on the sleeve heads. This will never be exact because the top of the sleeve is larger than the armscye, but this is good enough for me. There is a very good tutorial on sewing with stripes on the Tilly and the Buttons website, here, which I would highly recommend if you haven't tried this before.

All of the internal seams are stitched with the overlock stitch on my sewing machine. I used white cotton inside the shirt for a neat finish.

The shoulder seams have been stabilised with another piece of the seam tape that my grandmother gave me many years ago. She was a very talented seamstress and I always remember her when I incorporate something of hers into a garment.

I top stitched all of the hems on this T-shirt with a twin needle. I used black cotton for the top stitch details. This is only really visible around the neck where the stitching crosses the stripes. The rest of the top stitching is hidden against black stripes around the sleeves and the shirt hem.

I am very pleased with this top and am sure that I will get lots of wear out of it. These photos unfortunately don't show the colour of the contrasting stripes very well.

The sleeves on this shirt have been shortened to a 3/4 length. This is my favourite length. I am always pushing me sleeves up in the kitchen and at work, so a slightly shorter sleeve suits me better.