Fearless Placket: More Dress Shirt Construction

I love a professional, especially one who will roll up his/her sleeves and get down to it. A good sleeve placket cut to 6″ deep will make rolling up those sleeves so much easier. I think David Page Coffin’s placket in his Shirtmaking book, is the best I’ve found anywhere. but it used to strike fear deep into my confused and obsessive heart. No more! I think I’ve ended the fear. Follow me…into deepest, darkest placket process…

Believe it or not, there is only one seam. The rest is ironing the placket into shape and edgestitching it down.

Step one: wrong side of sleeve to wrong side of placket with the tall “tower” side of the placket toward the widest part of the sleeve, stitch 1/4″ around the slit, cut slit and clip into the corners. Remember that the taller side of the placket piece lies on the wider side of the sleeve! (I’m ripping out the seond sleeve as I upload these pix, sigh) So Pay Attention! And we’ll make quick work of this business.

Turn and Press. You now have a faced, .50″ wide cutout in your beautiful sleeve and you are working on the right side, the public side of your sleeve.

Most of the rest of the work will be done on the ironing board. On the shorter placket side, turn the far edge in .25″ and press.

And

Fold that strip in half over the cut edges

Topstitch a needle’s width away from the edge, this is called “edge stitching”.

Next, on the “tower” side of the placket fold in each edge where there is an arrow .25″. I made a little cut almost to the fold edge. Don’t bother with the seam allowance where there is no arrow…that will be covered by the handy-dandy placket “tower.”

Now, place the towering side of the placket over the first side and press into place.

See how the top cut edges are going to be covered by the “tower”?

Now edgestitch the tower and base down.

I went back and added a cross to keep everything inside from shifting around. This can also be done at the same time that you are edgestitching, with a little planning.