Shirt alterations

Hello everyone!

My lovely husband has a problem. He is starting a new job soon, for which he has to dress very formally.  Unfortunately, due to all the bodybuilding he has been doing, he can't find shirts that fit - anything big enough for his chest is too big for his neck and waist.  Here he is attempting to try on a shirt:

You can see the problem.

So today I have been altering two of his shirts to fit him properly.  I have never done alterations like this before, although I did already have a good idea in principle of how it needed to be done.  The first shirt was the simpler of the two - the collar fit quite nicely so it just needed darts in the back to fit his waist.  So I pinned (only poked him with a pin once!) and sewed and here is the result.

A nice fit! Not the neatest sewing in the world, but it will mostly be covered by his waistcoat (I told you this was going to be formal wear) so that doesn't matter too much right now.

The second shirt was bigger and despite already having darts in the back, it needed a lot more taking in.  I used the existing darts to give me a good idea of where I needed to sew, pinned and this time drew myself a line to sew along in an attempt to get things a bit neater.

So far, so good. The next step was the collar. It was about an inch too big.  Despite Googling, I couldn't find an online tutorial of how to do this so I had to make it up myself.  I decided to treat it like a waistband. I pinned to work out how much I needed to cut it down by, and then drew a sort of V-shape to cut out.

Slightly better planning would have centered the section on the existing seam in the yoke, but never mind.
Having cut it out, I folded the edges together and whip-stitched it up. A bit like you would for EPP, only going through a lot more layers.

The result looked like this:

We tried it on and it fitted!

I neatened up the stitching so that hole wasn't there so much and the edges were neater.  Here's how it looks on him after that:

So, success! Two nicely fitting shirts within an hour, without having to pay for custom-made stuff.  I would be able to do that again easily enough, so when he needs a new shirt, he can buy for his chest size.

I am really proud of myself for doing that. Expect more clothing alterations and transformations in the future!