The Stay-Tucked Boy's Dress Shirt

My little boy wears a collared shirt to church every Sunday. Even though he has a nice pin-striped dress shirt, most Sundays, he wears a polo shirt onesie instead. Why, you ask? One reason: the stay-tucked factor.

Cheri over at I Am Momma - Hear Me Roar has solved this dilemma with The "Always Tuck Me In" Shirt tutorial, which turns a dress shirt and a onesie into a dress shirt that always stays tucked! This is a winning solution for so many reasons:

• Baby looks snazzy wearing a dress shirt that stays tucked. Nothing less snazzy than an untucked and rumpled dress shirt.
• Mommy escapes insanity caused by needing to tuck dress shirt back in every time she picks baby up.
• Mommy saves money by buying great-condition boys' dress shirts and stained-neck onesies at yard sales. Compare the maximum $1 for both of those items to the $20 price tag on one of these or $40 for one of these. Or don't bother comparing because spending $1 will always be better than spending $20 and waaay better than spending $40.
• Daddy is happy because Mommy is saving money and because Baby looks oh-so-handsome and garners more "handsome like his daddy" compliments.

Time spent: 30 minutes (and that includes snack time :)
Money spent: 25¢ for dress shirt (last summer's yard sale-ing stash); free hand-me-down onesie; all other materials on hand






What I did differently...

• My onesie didn't have side seams like Cheri's, so after I cut the bottom off the onesie, while it was still laying flat, I marked each side with a marker so that I could match my marks with the side seams of the dress shirt.
• Before sewing, I pinned my marked sides to the side seam. When it comes to evenly distributing stretch, I must have pins to help me.
• As I stretched the onesie to be the same width as the dress shirt, I noticed that the button-down front (the overlapping button strip thing whose name I do not know) was coming open, so I pinned that part of the shirt closed to prevent any distortion or gap.

If When I do this again....
Absolutely no changes! This is so simple and I will for a certainty be doing this again. Maybe even to The Mr's shirts if I can find a onesie large enough... ;)

UPDATE 9.9.10:  One possible change... apply this treatment to a polo shirt! The lovely Nora commented that she used to do this to her boys' polo shirts... so now I can't wait to get my hands on a polo to try it out! 


This project is also my first Stashbusting September project (since I purchased the shirt last summer... before my almost-one-year-old was even born!). I'm fairly confident that I can go the whole month crafting only the planned-and-never-started projects in my stash... add to that the started-and-forgotten projects and I could probably go until Christmas!

My next stashbuster is a project I started last September: the diaper bag I started sewing the day before my son was born! I gave myself a one-year deadline and it's approaching all too quickly...


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