Monday 14 July 2014

A shirt for a spouse

My spouse, in fact. Ordinarily I have a policy of not making clothing for him (because he's perfectly capable of sewing his own), but since I'm planning fancy gentleman's clothing for me I figured I might as well practice on him.

The exemplar I'm using is a linen shirt dated between 1590 and 1620 that's apparently in the Bath Fashion Museum. (I say apparently because I can't find it on their website, though it appears on a number of Pinterest boards attributed to that museum.) It is also one of the patterned examples in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 4. 

The body of the shirt is a single continuous length of cloth with no seams at the shoulders. The 38-inch-wide fabric is the full width of the cloth, with the selvedges left attached. The sleeves are rectangles, gathered into the cuffs and with a square gusset in the underarm. The neck opening is a T-shaped slit with a rolled hem along the front and with small triangular gussets inserted at the tops of the shoulders before being gathered into the collar. The back of the shirt is several inches longer than the front.

The sleeves and gussets are attached using run and fell seams. Below the underarm gusset the selvedge edges are butted together until just below the hip, at which point it falls open to the bottom hem. The bottom hem is a very narrow rolled hem. There are reinforcing strips sewn in at the tops of the side openings.

The original shirt is heavily embroidered in black silk. There are alternating columns of scrolling flowers and leaves and isolated motifs of leaves and acorns on the front and back chest and both sleeves, as well as bands of similar scrolling flowers on the cuffs and collar. The columns running alongside the front neck opening merge into a single column below the opening.

Narrow linen tapes are sewn to the wrists just above where the cuff joins the sleeve, though it is not clear whether these are the original tapes.

My fabric is wider than the original, so I'm not going to be able to use the selvedges in the same way. I'll work run and fell seams all the way down the side openings and then continue the hems up to meet them. I'm also not planning to do nearly as much embroidery - just the collar and cuffs and possibly around the neck opening, in black embroidery cotton.

First up - cutting out the body and sleeves, and setting up the fabric that's going to become cuffs and collar on my embroidery frame.