McCall’s 6548: Boys Swim Shirt

Earlier this month, when I was in Los Angeles, I went on a shopping trip to the garment district and one fabric stores I went to was Michael Levine.  Right across from the main store there is another building where they house their fabric by the pound section.  I had never see anything like it.  It’s mostly knits and I found this gem of a kid swimsuit fabric with stripes and cute sea critters. I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it and it was so inexpensive that I just had to buy it. I bought that fabric and another piece of boucle-like fabric for a total of just over $7.  The fabric there is $2.50 a pound, if I remember correctly.  The solid blue fabric is swimsuit fabric from my stash.

I knew right away that I wanted to make a swim shirt for my son and so I started looking for a pattern.  There isn’t much in the way of boy patterns out there but something as simple as a raglan sleeve shirt was easy to find.  I chose McCall’s 6548 because it was the style I wanted and it was on sale, even though it was not specifically a swim shirt pattern.  Since I was making a swim shirt, which needs to be very fitted and my son is skinny, I cut the smallest size in the pattern, size 3.  It ended up being the right width but it was a tiny bit short.  Not too short, but next time I’ll definitely lengthen it a bit.  The pattern went together nicely, it is only 4 pattern pieces, including the neck binding. I sewed it entirely on the serger and it took me about two hours from tracing the pattern the complete.

As usual, my son loves it.  He loves the animals on the fabric and asked me how I made them 🙂