Hi everyone! It’s been a long time since I did a garb diary. Usually that wouldn’t be a big deal but this time I’ve actually been sewing. A lot.
Armed with the AMAZING pattern that Rosie helped me with (read all about that process here) I began work on my first kirtle. I decided to start on the side-lacing one because I’m making that one in my blue fabric, and blue is awesome and should come first every time!
I started by cutting out my pieces in my interlining fabric. For the interlining for these kirtles I’m using a combination of heavy linen (I’m pretty sure it’s the 8 oz/yd2 IL090 from Fabrics-store.com in Bleached, or maybe Optic White, I can’t remember exactly) and some sort of horsehair fabric that I found at Spotlight. I wanted horsehair canvas for its stiffness and I don’t think that’s exactly what I found, but it feels like natural fabric of some kind and it has no stretch to it at all, which in the end is the point. The heavy linen is stretchy (because it’s linen) so I added the horsehair whatsit stuff to stop it stretching (interlining needs to hold its shape). Anyways, after I cut out the pieces in exactly the same size as my pattern I then sewed them together. For the first dress, the blue one, I just used 1 layer of linen and 1 layer of the horsehair stuff.
Here’s a picture which kinda shows that. The grey-ish fabric is the horsehair stuff.
I sewed the layers together using running stitch around the edge, and then I put the pieces onto my blue fabric so that I could cut out the top layer, with appropriate seam allowance. The linen I used was the 5.3 oz/yd2 IL019 from Fabrics-store.com and I think the colour was Pacific Blue but I can’t remember or find where I put that information... Anyway, the following picture demonstrates how I went overboard with the aforementioned seam allowance; you can also see my running stitches on the interlining.
Once I had cut out both top pieces in my beautiful blue linen I basted the interlining to the corresponding top piece using a big running stitch. This was the only part of the process that I used definitely incorrect materials (I’m still not sure if my horsehair stuff counts as a period-accurate material but at this point I’m giving myself the benefit of the doubt). I used crappy cotton thread to do the basting. I used this because a) it was really low-quality random thread that we had laying around, as opposed to my fancy linen thread and b) because the basting stitches get pulled out at the end anyway so it didn’t really matter that much.
See the above picture: basting. Also, too much seam allowance.
My next step was to use herringbone stitch to attach the top-fabric to the interlining. I didn’t take any photos of my herringbone stitch, unfortunately. But basically I started about two finger-widths in (to leave room for finishing edges after I attach the skirt) and herringbone-stitched the whole way around, leaving the top of the shoulders open so that I could sew the seam later. I was pretty happy with my herringbone stitch, I think I did lots of nice small stitches and I made sure I never went through to the top fabric so it’s basically invisible now.
Cutting too big of a seam allowance caused some issues when I was doing herringbone stitch up around the shoulders and then when I was sewing the shoulder seam, but I fixed that problem by trimming down the seam allowance.
My next step was to sew the shoulder seams. I used back-stitch because that’s a nice strong stitch and the shoulder seams have to be particularly strong. On a side-lacing kirtle the only seam is the shoulder seam, because where side-seams would be otherwise there will be lacing on this dress. One of the shoulder seams went just fine but the other one turned out kinda lumpy. I don’t know what I did to make it go like that, but you can’t tell on the finished thing so I guess it sorted itself out.
I then cut out the lining fabric. My lining fabric is white linen, again from Fabrics-store.com, but I can’t for the life of me remember whether it’s the 5.3 oz/yd2 or the 3.5 oz/yd2. I cut out the lining fabric with too much seam allowance too and had to trim it down also. Once I’d cut it out/trimmed it down, my first step was to sew the shoulder seams. After that I pinned it into the rest of the bodice and then I tucked all the seam allowance in and sewed it down using slip stitch. I left a little gap at the bottoms (about two finger-widths) for finishing and sewing on the skirt.
I had a similar lumpy problem when I was sewing the lining down around the shoulder seams. In the following picture you can see some lumping:
The lumping isn’t too bad really, it just looks a bit messy. I couldn’t work out how to fix it up though so I’ve just left it that way. It’s on the inside so I don’t think it really matters that much. The other side turned out just fine. Here’s a picture of what the shoulders look like along the edges:
Here are a couple of pictures of the lining sewn down on the bodice, so this is what it looks like on the inside. I especially took pictures of corners and stuff because they are fiddly bits.
So that was the bodice pretty much finished, except for lacing holes and finishing off the edges at the very bottom. My next step was to do the skirt and that is where things went kinda wrong. I decided to do a bit of shaping at the top of the skirt.
This was my process: I measured the edge of my bodice, I folded and cut my fabric in half, I cut the diagonals at the top for the shaping.
The problem? I’d measured the shorter part of the bodice. I hadn’t even thought about the fact that the two pieces of the bodice have different length edges. Noooooo it was a disaster! One of the pieces was the right size but the other one was not. If I hadn’t already cut my diagonals I could have just rotated it (not ideal, but it would have worked) and cut different diagonals and it would have fit perfectly. But I had cut my diagonals so I freaked out and cried everywhere until mum came home to help.
We remeasured my edges, recalculated the lengths of fabric I needed and tossed around ideas of how to make it work. In the end I rotated to the too-small piece, which made it approximately the right size, and cut new diagonals even though they were smaller than the diagonals on the other piece. In the end I still have an unfortunate diagonal at the top and bottom on one side, but at the top it should be lost in the waist seam and hopefully at the bottom it will be lost in the hem, so no harm done in the end.
Now that my skirt-cutting drama was over, I was able to pin the skirt onto my dress. I lined up the seam allowances at the edges and pinned it in place and then went around pinning my pleats. I decided to do a box pleat in the middle and knife pleats fanning outwards because I think that looks nice. I had measured my skirt so that I would have three times the length of the bodice and I did tiny perfect pleats of 1cm width. I say perfect, I am seriously exaggerating when I say that. I ended up with the same number of pleats on both side (of the middle, not on both sides of the dress) but it took some wiggling. It’s very hard to get accurate pleats.
Once I’d pinned my pleats I used backstitch to sew the skirt on. I tried to sew it in such a way that I got some of the stitches into the interlining as well, so that when I removed the basting stitch it wouldn’t flap around at all at the bottom of the bodice.
Here is the skirt all sewn on and back-stitched and pleated. I’m pretty happy with it.
And here it is on the outside. The pleats don’t look entirely even here, even though I think they are pretty close to even. When you hold the dress up they look more even so it should look pretty okay when I wear it.
After the skirt was sewn onto both sides of the dress my next step was to sew the side-seam down the whole length of the skirt. I did it with back-stitch and it was a pretty uneventful step in the process.
Then I had to deal with this mess:
This is what it looked like at the bottom of the bodice. It’s excess seam allowance and that sort of thing and it needed to be neatly tucked down and finished off. I was quite unsure how to get that all working. It took looks of folding and poking and prodding and pinning and, eventually, stitching. Here’s how it turned out:
It think it looks pretty okay in its finished form. The folded bit down the edge is the edge of the skirt-opening. I folded it in and sewed it down using slip-stitch and it continues into the seam of the skirt where it then turns into a flat-fold finished seam.
Pictures for proof, the edge:
Pictures for proof, the seam and finishing on the inside:
That all went quite smoothly, except at the top where the seam-opening starts. I had to find some way to make that all be finished edges so that it didn’t fray to pieces and, well... just look:
So... it turned out kinda messy. That’s the inside, of course, so it’s not really a huge deal. In order to make it look neat and tidy on the outside I think I will try to sew a little buttonhole-bar, just to give it strength and neatness at the bottom. For now, though, it looks okay so I’ll probably do that as the last thing before I wear it.
I finished off the bottom of the bodice, over the skirt seam:
And then, goodbye basting stitch!
Yay! It’s looking quite good.
So what’s left to do on this dress? Well, it’s not wearable until I sew some lacing holes. The reason I haven’t done that yet is because I don’t have an awl. However, an awl is a belated part of my Christmas presents from mum and dad so when it arrives I will be sewing about a billion lacing-holes.
I asked a garb expert (Rosie, again) what colour my lacing holes should be. She told me that lacing holes in English garb are the same colour as the fabric. If I were sewing Flemish garb I might have just used my same natural-coloured linen thread to do the lacing holes. But I’m definitely English rather than anywhere else so I will be doing the lacing holes in matching blue thread. Linen thread is hard to find and even harder to colour-match, so I pulled a bunch of long threads out of my excess blue fabric. The lacing holes should end up pretty much invisible, as long as I sew them well!
I also have the bottom hem to go, but I’m planning to leave that until my lacing holes are done so that I can be properly wearing the dress when it comes time to measure the hem. I think that will make it the most accurate length-wise.
Without an awl I am currently stuck so I have left this dress alone for now. I’ll work on it more when I have an awl. In order to keep myself busy while waiting for that important tool, I started work on my next dress, yay!
But this post is pretty long already so I’ll blog about my next dress another time (maybe once I’ve made some more progress on it).
Hope this was an interesting read!
♥Nancy♬
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