How to sew a collar on a blouse.
There's a lot of different collar types out there, and they're all constructed slightly differently. It's really difficult to make a one-size fits all tutorial, but we're going to try.
If you're making a blouse/shirt, and you get to the collar, there's a few steps you should do first. One is to read all the parts of your instructions that tell you how to assemble the collar. The next is, if you feel like you don't fully understand the instructions, it to check out some tutorials and see if that makes things make more sense. If you're here, congrats on completing that step. The third step is to check if you have enough spare fabric to do a test run on your collar. If you don't have enough fabric to make the collar twice, go find some fabric to practice on, just in case.
This tutorial is going to cover two kinds of collars: single piece collars, and collars with a stand.
A single piece collar is what it says on the tin. The collar itself is constructed out of one piece of fabric. Sometimes, these collars sit flat on the neckline, and sometimes they will stand up off the neckline and fold somewhere along their length. When you are patterning a collar, it involves a lot of different steps to get a one-piece collar to fold where you want it to, so that it will stick up at the neckline where you want it to. When you're constructing a pattern someone else made, however, they're generally all built the same. In this case, the red collar is a flat-roll collar that doesn't stand up at the neckline. The white collar stands up a little bit, making it a rolled collar with a low stand.
Some people refer to flat-roll collars exclusive as peter pan collars, and some people use the term "peter pan collar" to describe any collar that's rounded in the front instead of being pointed. Because of this confusion, I'm not going to refer to any of these collars as peter pan collars. (this is also why I'm not referring to these as stand collars or convertible collars. If you get into sewing tutorials, at some point you're going to learn that no one knows what any form of collar is called or how its components work).
Some collars stick up off the neck because they're constructed with a separate collar stand. These collars are multiple pieces. They're a little more intense to make, but they can be built in more shapes than a one-piece collar.
This was going to be a tutorial for both of these kinds of collars, but I'm writing it right now and I'm like 15% of the one-piece tutorial and it's already a long as War and Peace, so multi-part collars will get their own tutorial later. I go over the basics briefly in this post, about halfway down, if you're stuck.
The collar of your shirt is right next to your face, meaning that when people look at you, they will see your collar. Because of this, even if the rest of your garment is a little half-assed, you really need your collar to look good. If the rest of your blouse looks very good, but your collar is sloppy, congrats, your whole blouse is sloppy. It's not fair but it's the world we live in.
This means that your priorities when you build a collar is that it is symmetrical and that it is smooth. Make sure you cut everything on the grain, cut everything evenly, sew precisely, pin as you go, grade and clip your seam allowances, and for the love of Mana please iron every single thing as you go. If it doesn't look good, stop, and fix it before you move on.
If you're a "i don't really understand that, but I'll figure it out as I go" kind of sewist, grab some scrap fabric and test it on that. With collars, you usually are working on smaller or on clipped seam allowances, so you get fewer chances to rip out a seam and retry it.
The first collar we're going to make today is from the McCall's Manikin pattern, which whoops why is that link there? is sadly out of print. This has a one-piece collar that stands up about an inch to an inch and a half before it rolls.
Step 1 is to make sure your neckline fits. Remember that you have seam allowance included in your blouse body. If your neckline is bad right now, you're not going to be able to fix it very easily once the collar is on. Be aware that if you change the neckline too much, the collar won't fit on it anymore. However, do not proceed with a collar where you know the shirt won't fit.
Your pattern will either have had you cut out the collar twice, or it would have given you a separate pattern for your collar and your under collar. It will also have given you some instructions on how to treat your neckline edge of your collar. In my pattern, the undercollar was clipped at the notches, and the neckline edge between the notches was pressed to the inside.
On a one-piece collar, the undercollar side (the side that faces your shoulders when you wear the finished blouse) is pretty rarely seen, so you're going to want to do your ruffle attachments to the under collar. This means that if the under collar is slightly more lumpy, no one can tell.
Generally, you will want to apply fusible interfacing to the undercollar, but if you're using sew-in interfacing, you want to sew it to the upper collar. Follow your instructions for that.
If you're making a collar for a clothing style that will at all allow you to put a ruffle or lace around the edge of the collar, I highly recommend that you do so. A little ruffle hides SO MANY SINS. Undercollar not lining up? Can't see it. There's a ruffle. Oh it's a 1/8" of in that one spot? Can't see it! There's a ruffle! Front of the collar meets a tiny bit off? That's to compensate for the ruffle, obviously. On a plain collar, you have to be careful that you're not even 1/16th of an inch off. On a ruffled edge collar, you can easily be 1/8" off in certain spots and no one can tell. That's why every rounded collar shirt at Hot Topic has a ruffle on it. Take some fabric or some lace, run a gathering line through the header side, and gather that up. Give it a little bit more of a gather than you think you'll need, because it will un-gather a little bit when you flip it right side out at the end.
You say, but Dollar-chan, isn't it hard to keep everything smooth with the ruffle? Isn't it hard to construct when you have embroidered tulle everwhere? Well, I'm going to share with everyone the greatest secret known to collar-making-kind.
Once you've sewn your lace around the edge of the collar, take a piece of contrasting thread (mine is red) and sew a hand basting stitch along the outside edge of your ruffle. Pull those basting stitches to gather the outside edge, until it lays flat pointed towards your collar. I've learned that this is the best system. Using hand basting will allow the outside edge of the ruffle to self-distribute, keeping your trim or ruffle very even. The first time that I did this I was so angry that something that worked so well was also so easy. It feels like cheating.
I know that you usually avoid doing this, but go ahead and iron the crap out of your ruffle or your trim, even though that's going to be putting creases into your ruffle layer. You want them to be as small as possible so that everything can line up right in future steps. You'll have some fun times getting everything to be pretty again when you're done with the collar, but that's a "done with the collar" problem.
Slap your upper collar piece onto your under collar, sandwiching all of the lace in the middle. Pin that.
Now, it's at the point where it's very important that the front edges of the collar are symmetrical. Depending on your fabric and your trim and your whatever else you're working with, this might be very easy for you, but I usually need some help.
I go back to my collar pattern piece, and i make a second copy of half of that piece on a new piece of paper. I then trim the seam allowance off the outside edge of that piece of paper.
I take my new pattern piece, and I trace the edges of it onto my new piece. Since I use the same piece for each front edge of the collar, I know that they will match up.
Take that hand sewing needle and contrast thread that you used for the ruffle, and hand baste the outside edge of the collar together.
We're hand-basting this instead of pinning it, because pins don't fold and move with the fabric. Also, a lot of people don't like sewing over their pins (for me it depends on what machine I'm working on) but I don't know anyone who believes that sewing over hand basting will be bad for their machine. It's annoying, but you get a better result. Also, it is less annoying that redoing the same collar part three times, so it's the world we're currently living in. Baste that edge and then run it through your machine. Sew right on top of that line that you traced, so that you have a perfectly symmetrical line of sewing.
If you turn it to the front right now, it's going to look a little bit messy, so let's turn it back inside out.
Grading or layering your seam is when you cut each seam allowance to be a different length. This makes it so that you don't have a harsh line where your seam allowance burns through to the front of the fabric.
When you're grading a collar with a ruffle in the seam, you grade the ruffle separately from the undercollar it's sewn onto. You can see here how my undercollar is shorter than the trim edge, which is shorter than the outer collar edge.
I also have clipped my seam allowance at the point of my collar. This lets it turn in evenly. If you have a very pointed collar, you want to blunt that corner when you sew it. You can see on my line of stitching that, instead of sewing to a single point and then pivoting, I came up to the edge and pivoted twice. This process, called blunting the corner, gives the collar room for the seam allowance to fit once it's turned.
You're then going to cut notches in your collar edge. I don't care what that guy on tiktok says, you need to do this on a collar, especially on any collar not made out of muslin. You have trim in there. You have interfacing in there. You have two layers of fabric in there. You need to take these notches out of the seam allowance or else your seam allowance won't be able to fit into your collar when you turn it to front. It will look bad.
At this point, we've probably done in 30 steps what your pattern instructions told you to do in three. Taking the time to construct the collar properly is worth it, because your collar is a very important part of your face. But, now that you've built it, it's time to put it on the neckline. There are a lot of different ways to attach the collar to the neck of the garment, and you should do whatever your instructions tell you to.
In the case of this blouse, you just sandwich the neckline seam into the collar seam, and sew it down. That turned down area is there so that you can access the whole area easier and make things smoother. Some patterns will have you use bias tape for a finish. Some patterns will have you cut a separate facing that will lie flat on the shoulders of the blouse.
Whatever way they tell you to do it, just go ahead and do that. If you're stuck on a specific technique, send me an ask, and I'll see if I can do a tutorial on that. I can't make a tutorial on every method right now, because there's some fine details about figuring out where and how to have the front neckline overlap or gap.
You are going to run into some people who really don't like when the front neckline doesn't take into account the ruffle.
To bring back this picture from up above, you can see how the collar stops on either side of the button placket, but the gap isn't visible because the ruffle fills the space? Some people believe that you are required to have this gap when you've added a ruffle onto your collar.
There's also plenty of blouses out there where this gap does not exist, regardless of the size of the outer ruffle, so I recommend just doing what your pattern tells you to do. No matter what you do, someone's going to say it's wrong, and someone's going to say it's the only correct option. Welcome to the world of handmade EGL, where the rules are made up and as long as the coord balances, your construction was correct.
Anyway, remember, symmetry and smoothness matter, go ahead and fake the rest.
