Plackets

I know I promised to do other tutorials, and I still will, I'm going to post about how to do a shirt placket. Because I have to have some thing to look at to remind me how it all goes together, you all have to look at it with me. So here goes.

This placket is the set up used in the sleeves of dress shirts and the neck opening of pull overs. I stole this almost entirely from David Coffin's book-Shirtmaking. I have tried other methods of sewing a placket and other shapes such as the two part placket and pointed ends vs square ends. Coffin's method is the easiest minus two details, the final top stitching and folding the point, but we'll get to that


This is right out of Coffin's book.


Here's my pattern. I went a little crazy with the notches.


The pink is the placket and the red is our imaginary sleeve or shirt front or whatever.



The first part is all ironing. I think that making the top square and then folding the triangle makes the top too bulky and is difficult to make a perfect triangle. In the future I will cut the triangle with 1/4 seam allowances and use a triangle shaped piece of tag board to iron around.







Here they finally get pinned together.





You can't make out the stitch line very well here but you can see it better in the next one. As a note I will draw this box in with pencil to make it easier to stitch around.

Make sure to clip all the way to corners.


You should iron placket opening at this point.


Top stitch the underlap.






I top stitch the overlap up to the point where it joins the shirt and then take it out of the machine, line it all up again and put it back in to top stitch the triangle but I forgot to put in that picture.



Sewing this rectangle on is the worst part I can't seem to get it to line up just right on the underside. Does anybody have a good trick for it? If I have to hand baste it I know I'm doing something wrong.


See. Its still crooked. It makes me crazy.


Ta Da!