Working as a dressmaker for flamenco artists I mostly make dresses, skirts and tops for women. But not all dancers are women and I quickly found that there is demand for trousers, vests and shirts for men. I had never made a shirt before so I started searching for a book that would teach me and discovered David Page Coffin’s book “Shirtmaking – Developing Skills for Fine Sewing”.

The first time I skimmed through the pages I knew this would become one of my favourite books.

David Page Coffin wrote the book because when he was tired of wearing ready-made shirts that didn’t fit and decided to have a go at making his own he couldn’t find a good resource to help him. He had to learn by trial and error and wanted to spare other sewing enthusiasts the painful process.

In the first section (“Shirts Examined”) he explains materials used to make shirts, the tools you will need and the details of a classic shirt.

Then we are moving on to the section about “Patternmaking” where David Page Coffin explains what makes a shirt fit and how to develop a shirt pattern. He briefly looks at adjusting a commercial pattern, drafting your own, copying an existing shirt and a method combined of those three that he calls the drape method. I always draft my own patterns so I never followed this method closely but I found many helpful hints when trying to solve fitting problems. For me, the part on sleeves is one of the most valuable in the entire book. What I learnt there I apply in every garment with sleeves I make.

The next section covers “Shirt Construction”. Here, David Page Coffin teaches all the techniques needed to make a shirt (cuffs, collars, sleeve plackets, flat felled seams and more) in detail. He has made lots of shirts so he knows exactly where things are tricky and shows the best method to achieve the desired result. It pays to follow his advice to practice all of them before attempting to make your first shirt.

Eventually, we are “Sewing it all Together” – a step by step guide to help you through the sequence of tasks required to sew your shirt. Following it avoids the frustration of having completed some part just to realise that something else needed to be done first.

The last section of the book is full of ideas for variations of the classic shirt which you can pick up or use as a starting point for your own designs.

David Page Coffin’s book is certainly not aimed at people new to sewing but it is without a doubt one of the most valuable sewing resources I have found, not only for making shirts.

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