A Tale of Two Tab Collars

My husband Bob and I had a booth at our local Home Show over the last weekend to promote his Home Inspection business. Rather than wear the regular woven work shirts, which would be subject to wrinkles, I decided to make knit shirts for the two of us.
The trouble was, the pattern pieces generated by PatternMaster were a bit confusing.

The instructions provided with the program are usually very easy to follow, but for some reason I just couldn't wrap my head around the ones for this tab collar. I looked in my various sewing books for help, but the ones shown in the books looked very different. In desperation, I turned to the most wonderful resource: the Creative Machine List on Yahoo (Full disclosure: I am the owner of the list). Within a few minutes, I had my answer: this is called a "shirt neckline placket". And a member was kind enough to scan some instructions so I could complete my project.
Here we are at the show (apologies for the fuzzy picture...):
Now that the hustle and bustle is over, I got the chance to take pictures of the shirts in better light. Here's Bob's shirt:
And here's my shirt:
Now here's the interesting part: I made my shirt first, so the tab is a little wonky, but it wasn't immediately obvious. But one thing did bother me: the instructions my list friend provided called for the collar to be inserted in such a way that the seam between the collar and bodice would be on the outside of the shirt.
Luckily, it doesn't show at all when I wear the shirt, since the collar folds down over it. And doing it this way does mean there isn't a seam showing if I keep the top button undone. (In this picture, you can see the bottom of the tab really didn't turn out too well, but again... no one better be looking this closely!)

Bob's tab turned out nicer, and for his I did the collar in such a way that the seam is on the inside. I'm really not sure which version I like better; in either case, I need to bind the seam so it's not so unfinished. Live and learn.

And, of course, the company logo had to be featured on the shirts. I digitized the logo with Embird Studio (love that program!) and stitched them on the knit with my Designer 1 (now that I raised it on a platform, I'm doing a lot more embroidery!).
Next up on the sewing agenda is a new sundress for Diana, using the same pattern as for this Anthropologie knock-off.

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