Sunday, December 25, 2022

Hemming and Hawing

Back in 2008 when I first worked at Palm, they gave me a bunch of palm-branded merch as a welcoming gift. And also to clean out their palm-branded merch closet, probably. One of those items was a t-shirt celebrating the launch of the Treo 750.

It's a nice enough t-shirt. It's the usual tv-static-grey t-shirt colour, with black rib-knit cuffs around the sleeves and neck, and it's printed with a wireframe model of the Treo 750.

It does have a few shortcomings, though. The first and probably least solvable one is that the way the design is printed, whimsically positioned around the torso of the shirt, makes it incredibly confusing figuring out the front from the back, and because of this it's the only t-shirt in my collection that I still frequently, to this day, accidentally put on backwards.

The other problem is those black rib-knit cuffs.

They are simply overlocked in place, and this results in a somewhat bulky seam on the inside that tends to fold back on itself in awkward ways, and also tends to pucker the edge of the t-shirt fabric a little. Luckily I do have the means to fix this issue.

So, I loaded up my coverstitch machine with a medium grey thread in the needles and a reasonably well matched grey wooly nylon in the looper and stitched the seam down into place.

My coverstitch machine doesn't have a free arm, so I had to make do with sewing the sleeve inverted, but since it was right up near the hem it wasn't a big deal.

The result is a seam that is now completely under control and, as a bonus, a sleeve with much less puckering in the fabric.

I also gave the same treatment to the front of the rib knit trim around the neck hole (the rear already had some bias lining sewn over it to avoid the seam there sawing the back of your neck open) since I had the machine out and set up.

I'm quite pleased with how this turned out.

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