Plantain Tee Vs. Union St. Tee

Hello Internet Friends!

If you’ve been lurking my instagram you’ll know that a few weeks ago I received a luscious stack of cotton knits from Blackbird Fabrics and I asked for some T-shirt pattern suggestions. My go to pattern for T-shirts the last few years has been the trusty (and ever free!) Plantain Tee from Deer and Doe, it’s a very simple T-shirt design with some simple waist shaping that always seems to do the trick! This time around I decided that I wanted to branch out a bit from my go to and see if there were any other patterns that I would also love. I had previously tried the lark tee a few times but ran into issue of it really bunching at the hips and being overly too long, so rather than try to adjust that pattern I asked #SewistsOfInstagram if they had any suggestions. As usual the online sewing community was super helpful and pointed me in the direction of the Union St Tee by Hey June Handmade, which I ultimately decided to purchase and use! I like the fact that it has several neckline options and that the fit was more of a classic tee with minimal shaping made it an attractive option. Sidebar: I didn’t realize I had worn my fluffy slippers for all the photos until after they were all done, but I think it adds to the ‘work from home vibe!’

I had originally intended to sew a single tee from each striped print that I bought, but through a stroke of luck I had happened to buy 1.5 meters of each so I was able to squeeze out two tees from each fabric (I think I was thinking to make long sleeve tees at the time when I was buying)! So I decided what better time than to compare these two patterns, head to head in the exact same fabric! The first with a more light weight knit and the second with a bit more structure! For each of the two T shirts made from either pattern I cut a size 38 in the Plantain with no modifications other than the short-sleeve (which I’ll get to later) and for the Union I cut a size medium and shortened it by 1”.

Union St. in the blogger classic ‘look at your toes’

Plantain in the blogger classic ‘look at your toes’

When it came to cutting out these patterns I did as good of a job as I could with the stripe matching and did some baste test fitting since, as usual, I wanted to cut out all of the patterns in one go. By doing some baste fitting along the way I could identify any major fit issues with the Union St Tee straight away. I started with the more light weight of the fabrics, a micro striped speckled cotton jersey. For this comparison the Plantain tee has the 3/4 length sleeve and the Union St. has short sleeves (I used the scoop neck view for the Union St. as a direct comparison to the Plantain).

For this lightweight fabric I feel like the Union St. is my favourite of the two. The looser fit of the Union St. lends itself well to this fabric and just has a very relaxed vibe. I’m wearing my In the Folds Darlow pants (which again I will get better pictures of one day I promise!) and I think the union street works really well, I could have tucked in the front a bit for a more stylized look which I’ll probably do in the future. I don’t know if my impressions are swayed by the sleeves of the Plantain, the sleeves fit but because of the horizontal stripe I feel like it makes my arms look overly large. I haven’t had this impression with other Plantain’s I’ve made with the 3/4 sleeves so I think it must be the horizontal stripe doing visual tricks. I think over all, for lighter weight fabrics I’ll be leaning towards the Union St tee, perhaps with just a bit of shaping by coming down a size in at the waist and hips just to reduce the amount extra fabric in those areas.

For the second knit, a cotton jersey with more structure, I decided to be a bit more adventurous…I’ve always wanted to try out a V-necked Plantain tee so after cutting out the Union St. version with the V neck and checking the fit I made a mini additional add on piece to the Plantain tee to transfer the V neck from the Union st to the Plantain. First, I realized after doing the baste fitting on the V neck Union St. that the V was a tad low for my liking, so I raised the point of the V by tracing centre front and V neck portion of the neck line, then moving the pattern down by about 1/2” and then blending in that new neckline into the existing one and taping the pieces together. To transfer this new neckline to the Plantain I traced the new front piece from the Union St. from the centre front all the way up to the should and then the top of the shoulder. I then lined up Plantain tee at the shoulder (the pieces were really similar) and then used washi tape to make to stick the pattern piece to the traced piece so that I could easily remove the new neckline if I wanted. The new raised neckline of the Union St. was a bit shorter than the original when I used a tape measure to compare lengths, so I ended up shortening the neckband piece by a corresponding amount which, in retrospect, may have been too much to remove as it was a bit difficult to get the neckband to stretch enough so I’ll have to change that back for future iterations.

The only other change I made to the Plantain version was to use the short sleeves from the Union St pattern. With the first version of the Union St I found I really liked the looser fit of the sleeves so I decided to use that instead of the drafted Plantain short sleeve. To do this I first compared the armscye of the two patterns to each other and found that they were fairly similar. To ensure that the Union St tee would fit in the Plantain I traced out a copy of the sleeve on to parchment paper and then ‘walked the seam’ of the two pieces, this video from Alexandra Morgan walks you through the whole process. I found that I needed to move the shoulder seam point a bit on the sleeve to get everything to work out but other than that I didn’t have to change the piece.

For this more structured fabric I think the Plantain comes out on top! I really like how this version turned out and I think it’ll be a go to T-shirt in my wardrobe for a while. The transfer of the V neck from the Union St. over to the Plantain worked out really well and the instructions on how to sew a perfect V neck included in the Union St. pattern made the process super easy to sew! I also really like these new short sleeves on this Plantain so I think any future ones will for sure have the Union St. sleeves. The Union St. version is still really nice, I’m just not a huge fan of the amount of excess fabric that seems to pool around my hips. I think tucking in the front or tying a knot would help this, as well as adding some subtle shaping to the pattern as I described above. I may go back and do some test side seam basting to see if I can modify this version to be a tad more fitted without losing that relaxed feel of the pattern.

What do you guys think? I think it’s really helpful to see pattern comparisons in the same fabric as it can really help you decide which pattern will be the best one for you especially with something as ubiquitous as a T shirt (it’s funny since you’d think that finding the perfect t shirt pattern would be easy but when you think about it finding the perfect fitting T shirt in RTW is also difficult!) Let me know if you preferred one version over the other in the comments!