Hey it's Haley at Seamwork and today I am sharing another Seamwork pattern hack with
you. I'm going to be showing you how to draft a Peter Pan collar. This is not a collar that will
turn you into Peter Pan, I wish I could do that. I can't do that for you though but a Peter Pan
collar is a style of collar that lays pretty flat to your shoulder, chest and back area.
It's really cute, really vintage inspired and I'm going to show you how to make it.
Okay so we're going to create a Peter Pan collar, which is a flat roll collar, which means the
collar doesn't really stand up at the back neckline and it lays very flush to your bodice.
We are going to utilize the existing neckline on our front and our back pattern piece to help us
to do that but I have a little trick for making it easier. You can do this with like a lot of like
tracing and slashing and spreading but what I like to do
is tape my two necklines together temporarily and we want to reduce, have you ever had a collar that
kind of like wings up and away from your shoulder? How you avoid that is you want to reduce a
little slice of high from your collar. To do that here I'm going to overlap the outer edges of my
shoulder seam by a half inch and that half inch is going to encourage
my collar to lay nice and flat. So I just made a little reference line.
I'm going to align these two edges flush right here but then over here
align with that little reference line
and then
you can temporarily tape that in place.
Once that's taped in place you need some pattern paper
and just slide that pattern paper right underneath
your neckline and make sure there's enough room to actually draw the collar once we get to that step.
I'm going to use my tape as a little pattern weight but if you have pattern weights
you can do that too, can of corn, whatever and we're going to trace our neckline
and our center front and back just a few inches of the center front and back.
Before you remove your bodice pieces from your pattern paper
make a little mark, a little cross mark where your shoulder seam is.
This can be a notch later on to help you sew that collar in place. All right
and set your bodice pieces to the side
and we can get drafting. If you want at this point so you don't forget what's what, you can label
a b and an f so you can distinguish between your back neckline and your front neckline.
Next we're going to add a little bit of shaping to this neckline so that we can encourage a little
bit of a roll. So even though a peter pan collar is a flat roll collar, you still need a little bit of
roll, a little bit of height to your collar to accommodate the roll of the fabric
the kind of turn of cloth, so on that back neckline we are going to raise the neckline
by just an eighth of an inch, very small amount, just an eighth of an inch
so we'll extend it and I'll make a little kind of squared off line there. I also am going to drop
my front neckline a little bit too. I'm going to drop it about a quarter of an inch.
This is all just going to help our neckline lay nice and flat. So I'm going to take my clear
ruler or a curved ruler now take my curved ruler and I'm going to redraw my neckline.
I want this raised mark to blend with the rest of my neckline and then this lower mark to blend.
I'm going to do that by with the least amount of
change to the overall neckline as possible so don't go too wild here,
just make little tweaks to the curve so that
you have that dropped front and that raised lower. If you're, don't want to get mixed up with all
of these lines you can go ahead and erase your old neckline to avoid any confusion later. Okay
now this is the shape of our collar neckline. From here you have so many different choices on
what you want to do, you can create a flat roll collar, Peter Pan collar that has a pointed tip,
what's most classic on a Peter Pan collar in particular is a nice rounded
front, kind of petal shape, but you can do kind of whatever even a sailor collar is very derivative
of a Peter Pan collar because it's a flat roll collar so you can have a nice
long bib in the back you do you this is where you can kind of let your creativity shine.
For my collar I'm going to keep it pretty classic, I'm going to do a three inch
width and then have it form a nice little petal at the front. So to do that I'm going to use the
grid on my ruler to help me draw a line that's three inches away from my neckline.
This looks a little bit jagged but I can take my curved ruler later and smooth it
all out. Right now i just want to establish kind of a base for that parallel curved line.
Okay,
now I can clean it up with my curved ruler
and then I'm going to draw
that petal shape.
Looking good! So this is my collar I can remark my little notch right here and I can also mark
the center back so that that has a little notch.
I'm going to cut this shape out and show you how to draft your under collar using your upper collar.
Great now we have this funky little pattern piece that is our Peter Pan collar.
You could go ahead at this point and label it "upper collar"
and right now there's no seam allowance added to it or anything but if you can either have this cut
on fold and this would be your fold line or you can when you're tracing and adding seam
allowance, you can open it up and add a grain line and have it mirrored on either side that's
kind of your choice but something that you definitely should do is draft an under collar.
An under collar that's specifically drafted to be an under collar is going to encourage
this outer edge of your collar to roll under so that you don't see that under collar peeking out
and it's really easy to do. You are going to place your upper
collar on some pattern paper weigh it down with something, object of your choice,
and trace all edges of it and make sure that you transfer that shoulder notch.
There is your traced collar and the next part is very easy what we want to do is we want to shave
an eighth of an inch off the outer edge of this collar and that's just
gonna encourage the upper collar to fold under to meet the under collar.
You're gonna use the grid of your clear ruler and just draw a line that's parallel to that curved
line of your outer collar
and this looks like a weird kind of like hairy line but this method of
drawing a small, I'm just drawing like about a quarter of an inch line rotating my ruler so
that it lines up at the eighth inch mark and then continuing that and that it's kind of a tedious
process but it allows us to make curved parallel lines which is what we want here.
It's things like this that are very easy when you're computer drafting
but when you're hand drafting they take some time.
All right after all that work I have a line that is an eighth of an inch in from the original
edge of my outer collar all I'm going to do is I'm going to cut along that new line,
the existing neckline and the center back to have my under collar.
I'm even going to mark it right now "under collar."
Once I cut along that line I can go ahead and add seam allowance to both my upper collar and
my under collar, typical seam allowance for a collar and a neckline is going to be a quarter
of an inch to 3/8 of an inch but that's really your choice as the pattern designer and drafter.
And that is how you draft a Peter pan collar. What is your favorite style of collar? Let me know in
the comments below and maybe I can show you how to make it. I'll see you next time. Happy sewing.