Happiness is a Peanuts Shirt – PART 1

Greetings, readers, from my home quarantine to yours!

Two weeks ago I purchased three yards of this Peanuts quilting cotton.  It’s called “The Gang’s All Here Toss” — toss referring to the fact that the beloved Peanuts characters are scrambled all over the fabric in a seemingly random pattern.  It’s by Springs Creative and can be found online pretty easily (it’s originally from 2019).  I was particularly drawn to it since teal is a good color for me, and, of course, I love all the Peanuts characters, who were a big part of my childhood.  I even played Snoopy in my high school production of “You’re a Good Man, Charlie Brown.”

Somebody left out an apostrophe, but what can you do?

Since it’s kind of an overwhelming pattern, I thought I might use a contrast solid for the inside collar and cuffs.  Also on eBay, I found someone selling a fabric lot of polka dot scraps in many different colors, which I purchased.  I could see a lot of the colors working with the fabric but in the end I narrowed it down to the black (second from the left, bottom row) and the brown (upper row, far right).

I started on the collar to see how it would look with the contrast fabrics.  I ended up choosing the black (which after laundering, actually turned out to be a very, very deep brown).

The brown with the larger polka dots.

The black (which laundered to a very, very dark brown) next to the original brown.

This also made the choice of topstitching thread easier: I chose black from among the many possibilities in my thread stash.

Here’s the finished collar.  I know, it looks like it’s cut upside down but this is how the characters landed in the toss.  I was going to recut it until I realized that on the finished shirt, with all the characters scrambled every which way, it’s going to look just fine (you’ll see).

Next I made my cuffs, also with the black(ish) polka dot contrast fabric and the black topstitching thread.

Next, I worked on my sleeve plackets.  Normally I’m not a huge fan of black topstitching (it’s very unforgiving) but it looks fine here; there’s a lot of black in the print.

I managed to get most of the shirt done today.  I still have to make buttonholes, add buttons, and hem and I may add a breast pocket.  That’s for tomorrow.

And that’s it!  This shirt is very cheerful looking and cheerful is what we can use a lot of these days.  Maybe I can even convince Michael to do an outdoor photoshoot.  Dare I whip up a matching mask?

Have a great day, everybody, and stay healthy!