You Just Can't Be Crabby Shirt - McCall's 6016

You can’t possibly be crabby when you see this shirt!  This fabric is just so darn cute!  I don’t get the chance to make clothes for little people because there aren’t any munchkins for me to sew for.  Luckily, my dear friend has a grandson on the way and clearly he’s going to need a shirt for the beach since he’s a socal boy (and..I had to find a use for this fabric from Fabricland.) 

I have come to find there aren’t very many baby boy shirt patterns out there.  There are patterns for toddlers but it wasn’t easy to find a collared shirt for a baby.  McCall’s 6016 turned out to be a nice option and it included shorts.  The shorts only took 1/2 yard, the shirt took 3/4 yard and I used buttons from my vintage stash.

I made a size 1 even though I wasn’t sure what that meant.  I went on the Gymboree website and compared the measurements from the pattern to their size chart and it looks like a size 1 translates to a 6-12 month at Gymboree.  This helped me quite a bit because when I made the shorts it called for elastic that was a "comfortable waist measurement plus 1”.  I didn’t have a little guy hanging around the house to measure, so I used the Gymboree waist size minus 1”.  I find that elastic grows when it’s in the casing so I always size down just slightly.

The shirt was too much fun to make.  It probably took me 3+ hours to finish which seems like quite a bit for such a wee little shirt but there was lots of topstitching and I took my time working the collarband and collar.

The pattern calls for the collar to be cut on the lengthwise grain but the crabs would have been sideways.  I cut the collar crosswise to make sure they were facing up and quite by accident, the crabs landed on the tips of the collar.  I also centered the crabs on the back collar and band and matched the pocket on the front.

I loved this project and hope I get to see the little guy in it with his chubby legs coming out of the shorts.