Drafting a separate uppercollar and undercollar pattern will prevent a visible seam and create a nicer looking collar. And in this tutorial I will show how it’s done.
If both pattern pieces are the same size there will be a visible seam, which is a nice thing to avoid. To explain I will show you an example:
I did this jersey blouse using the same pattern piece for the undercollar and the uppercollar. As you can see the collar seam is visible, at least from the side.
Compare this to the collar I am currently making, where the side seam is not visible. To see how this is achieved we need to flip the collar:
The surplus edge of the uppercollar is folded back and pressed, creating a neat finish. For this particular project I added 3 mm (approx 1/8 inches) to the front and lower side of the collar so that the undercollar pattern will be slightly smaller than the uppercollar.
However there are many ways to achieve this, in fact when I checked my pattern drafting books they all had different formulas and measurements for drafting separate collar pieces. But for this particular project, my simple method will work fine. A rule of thumb though is that a thicker fabric needs more allowance and a thinner fabric needs less. Also I stretched the undercollar while sewing to make sure the upper sides aligned.
