Dress Shirt Session 5: How to add Plackarts and Stitch Sleeves

So we've added some decoration to the front and back of our shirt, and now it's time to work on the sleeves. Now, there is an area of the sleeves near the cuff that you can add a little bit of customization to if you'd like, and that's what's known as a plackart. And that's this area right here, and it's this extra little strip of fabric that covers up the sleeve opening. And it really finishes off, and it really creates a nice look. Especially for a formal shirt, it looks really nice. Also, it's an area where if you're going to make a shirt like this where you have some contrasting colors in your collars and cuffs that you can also make the plackart out of the color to match your cuff, and it looks very nice. You don't have to do contrasting colors. You could use the same color as your shirt. But it still is just a very nice way to finish off that edge. And I'm gonna show you how to create that look now. So first we need to do any sort of prepping to our sleeve piece before we can add our plackart. And in this case, we need to do a couple pleats. Now, pleats are something you don't wanna forget to add in if they're on your pattern piece because a pleat is a fold in a fabric. So if we don't add that fold in the fabric, then when we go to attach our sleeve to our cuff, our sleeve is gonna be a lot longer than our cuff piece, and we might not know why that is. So check on your pattern and make sure if you do have a pleat that you are putting it in. So this is what they look like. They spell it out for you right here that this is a pleat. This is where we need to be doing the folds. And this one is really handy because it has arrows already for you. A lot of times there won't be arrows, but in general you will fold the solid line to the dotted line. So what I need to do is make some marks. Now, you could mark this with a fabric pen or pencil, but because I'm going to be pinning them anyway, I think it's a lot easier to actually just mark them with pins. So I have 'em here, and I actually have several different color varieties of pins, and I like to use different colors of pins, and that helps me know how I'm going to fold my pleats. So in this case, I have a yellow pin that I'm gonna put right here at the edge of the fabric along the solid line on both of them like this, and then I have a blue pin that I'm gonna put along the dotted line, again, right at the edge, just like this, because now I need to move my pattern piece off because I can't fold it while it's on there, so I'm gonna take it away. And now I have my different color pins, and now I know because my colors, I wanna fold yellow to blue. So that's why I like to have the different colors in there so it keeps everything straight for me. So what I'm gonna do is just take my fabric, fold the yellow pin till it lines up right on top of the blue pin, right like so. And now once they're lined up like that, I can actually just take one of them out and use it to actually secure that pleat in place like so. Do the same thing on this side. Again, we're going to go yellow folds over to blue like that. Take out one of our pins and pin our pleat in place. Now, you may think, "All right, it's just a fold in the fabric. Why does it really matter which direction I'm folding?" And a lot of it has to do with how your shirt is actually going to look when it's completed. So in this case, we're folding our pleats to the back. This is the back of the fabric of our sleeve. And if you don't know that by looking at your pattern piece, you can tell that by those notches we had to cut. Any time there's a double notch, it means it's the back. If we have a single notch, it means it's the front. So this is the back area of our shirt sleeve. And that's how I've pinned my shirt to our pattern piece. We wanna make sure we're folding our pleats to the back. It'll just look a lot nicer, and it flows a little better into our plackart here if we have our pleats going in the right direction. So we have 'em pinned, and now we need to stitch them. Now, normal construction stitching is, again, that 5/8-inch seam allowance. And we don't want our basting that we're gonna be doing on our pleats here to show in our finished stitching, so we wanna stitch it less than 5/8. So what I like to do is just line the edge of my fabric up with the edge of the presser foot and stitch across them. That'll be plenty of room that is going to secure our pleats but not so much that it's gonna show once we actually attach our cuff to the bottom of our sleeve. Again, I'm stitching right up to the pin and then taking it out. And go ahead and put backstitch in place. And now I've only had to stitch just right over the pleats. There's really no need to stitch all the way along the bottom of the sleeve, and all you need to do is hold that in place. So now we have 'em held in place, and I like to go ahead and just pull 'em out a little bit like that. And then I'm just gonna press it just nice and flat like that. Okay, and those will sort of get manipulated a little bit more as we're working through our sleeve. They're gonna kinda get jumbled up when we're trying to put our cuff on and we're actually putting the sleeve into our shirt, so I'm just doing a light pressing on it right now. But once you're done with your shirt, completely done, you can actually give those a really nice press so you have some really solid pleats in there. So now what we wanna do is we wanna form our plackart. And now, that is this little piece right here. Now, if your pattern doesn't come with one, all plackarts start with this same general piece. Now, the one thing that you could change if you wanted was the height of your plackart. But in general, this is typical size for one. If you were to change the height of it, that would just mean it goes further up your arm, and that's a style thing that you can change if you'd like, or you can go with the standard size. So there's a few markings that are important on our plackart, and that is this stitching line here. It's this dotted line all the way around. And what we wanna do is we want to transfer that stitching line onto our actual piece. So to do that, I'm going to fold this fabric or this pattern piece here. Gonna lay it on with the wrong side down, and then I'm gonna fold it back to one of those stitching lines just like that. Put a little crease in it. And now I can take and I can draw my stitching line. Again, I'm gonna get my Omnigrip ruler. This is even great for this because it's gonna grip to all the surfaces. Not only is my ruler gonna grip to my table, it's going to grip to my pattern piece too, so I know that it's gonna stay in place when I go to draw this line. So I'm gonna go ahead, make sure everything is lined up, and I'm gonna trace that stitching line onto the fabric. Now, I have my marking pencils here, and these are great pencils to use because the lead comes in both dark and white. So in this case, since I have my black fabric, I wanna use my white pencil. And I can go ahead and just draw right along that ruler like so. Okay, and you can see I have... Move that away so you can see I have one line drawn in place. Now I'm gonna take and fold it to the next line. Crease it. Do the same thing right like so. Line my ruler up. My ruler helps hold that pattern paper down onto our fabric. And we can draw that line up as well. Then all we need to do is connect the top of our two lines. So I would fold it down. And this one is so small that I'm not gonna actually worry about using a ruler. I'm just gonna draw right across there. Now you can see here, I didn't quite make this line long enough. All I have to do is extend that up, and I have my stitching line completely marked on our plackart piece. Now, you'll notice on this piece that it also has these little dots. And those dots are how you're going to line this plackart up onto your actual sleeve. So that means you're gonna need to refer back to your sleeve pattern piece. This is why it's important when you're cutting out your fabric, don't just cut out all your pieces and then throw your fabric or your pattern pieces aside somewhere. They have a lot of useful markings that you might have to go back and reference later. So I have my pattern piece here. And this is also something that if you know that you wanna just put your pattern aside, or maybe you've borrowed it from somebody and you need to return it or something, you can go ahead and make all of these marks on your fabric using your fabric pencil ahead of time. But a lot of marks, like this one here, is done on the right side of the fabric. So I don't like to actually do those marks with pencil. I want to do them using pins. So that's why I like to wait until I'm at that step so I don't have pins anywhere that are gonna poke me accidentally. So what I wanna do is line up our pattern piece over our sleeve. Now, as you can see, we've already stitched our pleat in place. So this piece is obviously gonna be a little bit smaller than our pattern. So we wanna line up this edge of the pattern piece with our fabric because that's the edge where our little marks are. So you can just, for example, I'll have my plackart piece, and you can see how those circles would line up nicely over the top. So that's what we're gonna accomplish, is we need to line up our plackart piece on our sleeve. In order to do that, we're gonna transfer these circles. Again, I like to use pins. So what I'm gonna do is just take... I hold my finger right next to the circle, lift up the pattern piece, and then put a pin in place. Now, I like doing this sort of pinning actually on top of something like a pressing surface or your ironing board because I'm just sort of pushing that pin in, and it actually goes all the way into my pressing surface too and holds everything nice for me. So I can go ahead and put my finger down next to the circle, lift my pattern piece up, and put in my pin, and do the same thing up here. Lift it up further, keeping my finger holding that in place, and see underneath it like so, and put my pin in place. And we have one last one to do. I'll fold from this side so you can see. Fold all the way down. See where my finger is. I know that's right where I wanna put my pin. So now that I have that marked, I need to actually put my plackart in place. So that, I'm gonna use, yet again, some more pins. So here, I take a pin. From the wrong side, so I can't really see where my line is, but if I go and I look and I put a pin through the wrong side like that, I know that this pin needs to line up with this one here. Layer it over the top and pin it in place, okay? Now I'm gonna move down to this bottom one here because really once you get one in place, everything should kind of line up. So you can see I have fold this back here. My two lines that I've drawn line up perfectly with these two pins down here, so I have... I know that that's right in place. I can go ahead and just put a couple more pins in to secure it all the way around, and I'd be good to go. Now, what I wanna do now is actually stitch. Now, because of the way I did this and I used my stitching line that I drew on there to line it up, I would have to then take this back over and redraw my stitching line if I can't see it through my fabric. So I've actually already done that on another piece here that I'll show you. And what I've done is I've made sort of a smaller little sleeve, and I've done that because plackarts can be tricky. They can be tricky whether you've done then 10 times or this is your first time ever doing a plackart. So I like to practice them a couple times before I actually put them into my finished shirt. So what I've done is I've just cut off the bottom little section of our sleeve, and this could be your practice plackart if you want. So I have already redrawn my stitching line on, and now I need to do exactly what it says and stitch, following right along that line. Take it over to our machine. Okay, and we're gonna stitch. Do as best as you can to stay directly right on top of that stitching line and get to the corner. My needle is down. I'm gonna pivot. I didn't quite go far enough, so I can go back, do one more stitch. You can see I'm lined up, ready to go right along that line I've drawn. Pivot again. Continue down the other side. You can go ahead and stop. And now I'm stopping where my stitching line stops. And if you're wondering, "Well, why don't you have to go all the way down to the bottom?" That's because that's where our seam allowance is going to be. That's our 5/8 of an inch. So that area will actually get stitched when we attach our cuff to the sleeve, so we don't have to worry about it right now. So we have our plackart stitched in place, and now plackarts are a lot of pressing. They're a lot of folding and pressing. The better you get at it, the quicker you'll get, but really just being really... Trying to press as accurately as you can is gonna give a nice finished-looking plackart. So what we need to do is we're going to cut in the middle of our stitching line, all the way till about 1/4 inch from the stitching line. What I wanna do now is angle my cuts out towards the corners. And you can see I'm getting really close to the corner, but I'm not going too close. I don't wanna accidentally clip that stitching line. Now, if you do accidentally clip it, just stop what you're doing right here, go back, and restitch over that area because you're gonna want it to hold in place. So we're going to go over and do the same thing out this way towards the corner, just stitching or clipping towards our stitching. Now we need to take all of this, push it through our stitching. Actually turn it to the right side. Okay, pull it out like this. And this is where the pressing starts. So what we wanna do is essentially make this to where it's flat again. So what I'm gonna do is it takes a little bit of maneuvering, but you want to press open your, or press your seam a little bit here so you can then fold back this side of the plackart along, right along that stitching. So there's my stitching line. I'm folding right along it. And I can press here. Okay, wanna do the same thing on the other side. Kinda pull this piece over so I can press out my stitching. And then again, I'm folding back right along that stitching line. Everything should lay nice and flat. I should just have my opening of my stitching line. Okay, make sure everything's lined up. And like I said, the more accurate you can be with your pressing, the better your plackart's gonna look in the end. Now what we need to do is we're essentially just going to be folding everything to the back side. So what I'm gonna do with this here is I have this raw edge, and I need to finish it. So I'm going to double fold it under like this. Okay, so I've just folded it twice. Again, I folded one time here. Fold it over a second time. And I'm going to press it in place. So that is my nice finished edge along here. And this is how this side is gonna be finished. So I wanna go ahead and put a pin just to sort of hold my fold that I've pressed. And now what we need to do is if you look back here at our sleeve again, you'll notice that we don't have a big rectangular opening. That's because this fabric is folded over, and it covers it. So that sort of helps you remember which way you need to fold your plackart. If you fold it the wrong way, you're just gonna have a big sort of rectangle opening in your sleeve. So you need it so that that little flap of fabric covers this rectangle here. So in order to do that, again, we wanna make sure we have a nice finished edge. So we're gonna fold under just like we were doing with our pockets, with our yokes. Everything has a nice finished edge. We're folding under just a small amount, almost 1/4 inch there. Didn't quite hold in place that time. Give it a little bit of steam if you need to. Make sure it's really holding in place. Okay, and then we are going to do the same thing along all edges. So I'm gonna bring my pattern piece out, just because I've done this. In the color, it's a little bit difficult to see, but what I'm doing is I'm folding in 1/4 of an inch all the way around this edge here, up to our point, along here, and this edge here. So I wanna make sure that when I'm looking at it that everything is gonna be finished. So I can go ahead and fold, again, 1/4 of an inch here. Go ahead and press it like so. Again we're gonna fold. So again, a lot of folding, a lot of pressing, but it's gonna really help hold everything in place and make it look nice and finished when you're done. You have all your edges folded. Now it's time to pull your plackart over your rectangle. So you need it to close just like so. What you wanna do is take and line up this folded edge here with our folded edge of the other side of the plackart like so. Make sure everything is pressed under like that. Go ahead and give it another little press. Hold it down. And then we're just going to do some stitching. So what we're gonna need to do is we are going to stitch along this folded edge here up to our point and over, and then we're going to stitch down and across. So it sounds like it's a little bit complicated because there's a lot of areas where we need to stitch, but it's really simple, and I'm gonna show you how to do that in just a sec. So now that I've taken the time to really press it and make sure it's in place, I've let it cool a little bit, again, making sure that once I press it, I don't just pick it up right away and everything I've just pressed comes undone. And then to even make sure it's extra secure, I've put a few pins in place, and now it's time to do some stitching. We're gonna go back to doing some edge stitching. We've done a lot of that already throughout this shirt, and we're gonna do some more of it here. So where we're going to edge stitch is right along our fold here and up into the point. Then once we get to there, you see we have our opening here. And we don't actually wanna stitch it closed, so that means we don't wanna stitch all the way down this side. Rather, you can sort of pull this back a little, and you can see you're only gonna be stitching down about an inch, and then we're gonna cut over. So I'm gonna do a little of that stitching and then show you the finished one so you can really sort of see the stitching path that I took. So I'm gonna bring it over to our machine here. And again, I'm going to take... I'm gonna actually start at the point. I think the point is sort of the trickiest part so that is where I like to start. So I'm gonna just put my needle down. Again, I'm all set up and ready to go for some edge stitching. And I'm just gonna start stitching. Again, I'm gonna lay my needle down, take my pins out as I get to them. Now, just like on our pockets, on our yoke, everywhere where we have to turn a corner, our needle is down. We pivot our fabric, make sure we're lined up, and then we continue stitching. Again, I have another turn coming up. My needle's down. I pivot my fabric, and then I'm gonna stitch all the way down. Okay, and I'm just gonna continue this line here, and then I'm gonna bring in one that's already been stitched so I can really show you the path of stitching that I took 'cause it can get a little bit complicated, but once you see it, you're gonna be like, "Oh, that makes total sense." Okay, so I have the little bit of stitching that I've done on this one. I have one that's already done here. So you can see what I'm talking about, about where I'm coming down one side. I've done my point. I've done, it's about an inch, and then I've gone over this way. And so that makes it to where I can still open up my plackart. If I were to stitch all the way down, it would really just defeat the purpose of everything I just did because I'd be stitching it right back together. So you really wanna make sure you only stitch down about an inch. And then on our other piece here, we had folded under that double fold we originally did. We would edge stitch along here just to hold that in place. And as you can see on our one that is finished, we've done just that. So it's edge stitched right here. Now, again, I've done this in white thread so you can really see it. It really stands out. You don't have to do it in white thread at all. If you like the way this looks and maybe you're doing some decorative stitching elsewhere, like on your cuffs or maybe your yoke area and you want that look, you can use the contrasting thread. If not, you can use black or whatever color fabric you have, and it'll blend right in. I'm gonna show you the back here because, again, we can see our stitching line because of our contrasting thread. But you can see that everything is nice and finished, even on the wrong side. We have no edges that are gonna fray. Everything is nice. It looks good on both sides. And really we're ready to move on with some more basic shirt assembly. So we have our front and back done, we have our sleeves done, and now it's time to put it all together.