Sew a Long Sleeve Swim Shirt

With all this swimming outside in the cool weather, I have needed more options for full body swim wear.  I like the red super hero suit that my husband gave me as an early Christmas gift, but it is more porous than polyester swimsuit fabric.  Hence, I feel the chill breeze a bit faster when I get out of the water.  Also, I have not yet learned to zip and unzip it by myself.   

The only close fitted, raglan sleeve shirt pattern I could find was a short sleeve, Kwik Sew men’s pattern, number 2881.  I had looked  everywhere, including my boxes of patterns, six well known pattern companies’ books, and all over the internet.  I have a swim shirt that fits, but I wasn’t ready to cut it up.  Upon examination, the shirt didn’t seem cooperative to laying in a way to draw pattern pieces from it while was still whole.  If I waited until it was worn, it might have lost enough stretch such that it was inaccurate.  So, I improvised!

There are design elements of the Kwik Sew pattern that I thought might be nice, that were not part of my ready-made swim shirt, .  Besides the much desired raglan sleeves, the shirt has a side panel, so there are no seams directly under the arm.  Anyone who has made repetitive-movements-with-seams-in-places-that-rub knows what I’m talking about.  That added piece would make it a little more challenging to adjust, though.

I could not find swimwear fabric locally, so ended up ordering it at fabric. com.  The fun prints were the same price per yard as the plain colors, so naturally I went with leopard print.  There will be pants to match, later.

The alteration and sewing processes were not without glitches, but I am an advocate of learning to problem solve during a project.  It’s only fabric, and if it takes a couple of times to get it right, I’ll still end up having learned something to use cost effectively some time, and have a better-fit-than-store-bought item later.  Below, I will outline my steps.

The first thing was to trace the pattern pieces onto pattern paper.  I find this is easiest with a pencil.  The front and back shirt pieces were straightforward.  The only change I wanted to make in them was to add about 4 inches of length.  This length at the bottom would help the shirt to stay in place over my waist during swimming.  I did moderately extend the curve (that was already in the pattern piece) from the waist to the hem as it approached the hipline, and kept the hemline curves.

Making the main sleeve pattern was the next easiest.

• After laying the original Kwik Sew piece out to be traced, I put the ready-made swim shirt sleeve on top of it, matching the necklines.
• I marked the end of the shirt sleeve on the pattern tracing paper, then removed the shirt. I found that the line I had drawn was not quite as perpendicular to the grain line of the sleeve pattern as I thought it should be.
• I also needed to center the end of the sleeve to the top of the sleeve.  I fixed all this with the help of a ruler.
• I added 1/2 inch for the sleeve hem.
• Then, I measured the circumference of the wrist of my ready-made sleeve and made the now perpendicular line equal on both sides of the center point, and added 1/4 inch on both sides for seam allowance.

In retrospect, I probably could have just measured the distance from my neckline to my wrist.  Since the stretch was most important around the wrist, I think it was best to estimate that from the ready-made shirt.  However, I need to mention the insert here.  It would need to come down the underside of the sleeve, so I estimated tapering that.  As it turns out, I should have made either the main wrist circumference about an inch bigger, or made the insert about an inch wide down there.  So, keep that in mind when looking at the pictures.  I will fix it all in the end.  🙂

 

The insert was the trickiest, because it needed to fit the whole length from the bottom of the shirt to the bottom of the sleeve.  I lined up the markings where it would match the sleeve and adjusted one end to the sleeve length, but gave it a taper to the end. When swimming, the fit at the wrist is very important. The shirt can be somewhat loose around the shoulders and biceps, as long as it fits closely enough at the wrist, neck, and from the main chest section down.  At this point, I forgot to add length for the main body of the insert.  When I tried on the first finished sleeve, I was able decide what to do to fix this for the other sleeve before sewing. The sewing instructions for the rest of the shirt were easy to apply to my long sleeve version, excepting the steps I had to take to correct the fit of the sleeves at the wrists, so I won’t go into that here.

 

(The sleeve is flipped in the opposite way for the second photo. That’s just how it ended up in my tracing and cutting process…)

The second sleeve’s insert was made  to end just a bit wider at the wrist, but not without some extra work.  Since I had already cut the inserts out of fabric, I cut the fabric piece above the taper, then cut another fabric piece to attach, leaving a 1/4 inch seam allowance on each piece, of course.  It is my opinion, that this is often how new designs are discovered!

When the shirt was all sewn together, I found that the first sleeve I had sewn was going to be too tight for comfort.  I had already serged all the seams, so wasn’t too excited about taking them out, but did it anyway.  Then, I cut a piece to widen the wrist, attaching it to the first insert piece similarly to how I had on the other side, but not as far up.  That would have been too much poking around in my fabric.

 

 

 

Now, I have a swim shirt that fits me perfectly!  The matching pants are all cut out, so that will be coming soon. There is some left-over leopard print, so I have a couple of girls hoping they will get new swim shirts, too.  With the pattern figured out, any more shirts can be sewn very quickly!

see how I made some swim pants here
see how I made a swim cap here