| Tinkering | 2026-03-08 » |
Tinkering: 2026-10-31: Shirt #12: Muertos
Recently
I found a very colourful fabric and decided to make a Simon shirt out of it.
The theme is 'Día de los Muertos', the Mexican festival of the 'Day of the Dead',
and the fabric has stunningly colourful skulls all over it. It is not a silly
fabric, but very seriously colourful, I think.
Many people asked me, so: making a shirt takes me about 40 hours, including cutting, sewing, and embroidering.
To contrast, black fabric is used, and the shirt is sewn with black thread.
The buttons are orange-red enamelled mother-of-pearl.
The shirt has a full collar and a covered button placket. The button placket is open only at the top few centimeters, so only two buttons need to be covered while the rest of the placket is sewn shut. The shirt has only five buttons because of this.
When standing straight with lowered arms, all visible skulls are upright.
For a very formal appearance, the shirt has a welt pocket.
It takes me about 8 hours to make the welt pocket. The time is mainly spent on cutting the right, matching piece of fabric (in this case only for the backside of the welt pocket, but sometimes also for the welt), for pattern alignment, making very careful stitches for attaching the pocket, and on being extremely cautious about not sewing shut the pocket. Or, alternatively, unpicking a seam when the pocket was sewn shut by mistake...
The collar has more skulls inside.
More skulls are on the underside of the collar.
Skulls are centered on the underside of the collar and
on the yoke.
My logo is embroidered by hand again.
The embroidery gets more and more precise as I now
consistently count the threads of the fabric. I am slow, it takes
about 2½ hours to do the embroidery.
More skulls are hidden on the inside of the cuffs.
