T-shirt with Stretchy Noodle Binding on Cotton Jersey

I finished sewing a T-shirt for my sweetie for his holiday present. It’s hard to buy him gifts, but he always wears the T-shirts I make him. This shirt is entirely hand stitched in cotton jersey, using techniques I learned from the books by Alabama Chanin.

My sweetie like AV equipment and electronics. So I made this stencil just for him. I appliquéd the design with backstitch.

Here, I used my original binding technique with a jersey noodle. This is the second shirt I’ve made with this edge treatment, and I really like it.

I cut the strips of cotton jersey 1.25” wide before stretching them into noodles. Then I appliquéd the noodle to the edges in two passes as I show in the drawings here.

It’s easy to do this binding on the neckline because you don’t have to ease it like you do with Alabama Chanin’s folded binding, which I find to be a particularly difficult task to do on curved necklines. The fold-over step with the noodle automatically makes the noodle shorter than the finished neckline, making it just the right tightness. Here you can see the fold-over step half done.

So the finished neckline is taught and stretchy. Next time, on the sleeve ends, I’ll ease the noodle a little (with a shorter noodle) because I think it belled a little, and a little taper there at the ends of the sleeves would have been better and could have been solved with some easing.

Thanks for looking. Happy holidays!