Channeling Coffin

Some years ago, while I was still in academia, I conducted a workshop and I was paid in books. This means there was no real money to pay me, but I could buy books to support my research or teaching.

But any book was fine. So I ordered, among other things, David Coffin's book on shirt-making. No relationship to teaching or research. Oh well.

Truthfully I was attracted to the cover, which included this woman's shirt. Just look how elegant she must be with her pleats, tucks, off-center collar, and of course the lovely fresh-cut flowers. I assumed the keys to this magical shirt would be within the covers of my new book.

Now I may have missed something, but I think that's the one shirt he never references in this book.

Recently I have been practicing my sleeve plackets (a.k.a. tower plackets) and so finally I realized that the *cuffs* were really cuff-less sleeves with the placket, pleats, an angular finish to the tower pleat, and one sweet button with possibly a loop.

So I set out to try to make a similar cuff-less cuff on my version of TSW Zen top. The sleeves on this top are plain and quite wide at the bottom. Perfect pallet for my experiment.

As usual I created a number of learning opportunities by screwing things up, but I won't detail those here.

I completed the placket as usual and added 3 pleats around it. Then I cut a self-fabric bias strip 2.5 inches wide, folded wrong sides together, and created a modified facing for the sleeve edge.

I noticed that no stitching shows on the right side of his sleeve cuff. How did he do that??? The fabric appears to be a light-weight, semi-sheer linen. So there cannot be any lining providing hidden support. I decided to simply turn and press the bias facing in place. Then I tacked it to the shirt everywhere I could do so without any surface stitch showing.

TSW Zen Double Collar

And it seems to have worked!

I'm thinking that clever double collar on the Zen top would make a clever cuff too.