- Hello, and good morning
kind friends and companions. I'm Morgan Donner, and I
decided that I am in the mood to make a shirt. I did my usual thing, I went online to look for inspiration, see if there's any cool like features that I want to make sure to include. And while searching, I found my own website from 10 years ago. One of my very, very first
dress diary blog type things was how to make an Elizabethan shift. This specific shift, in fact. I am very curious to see how
well or poorly it has aged. So I figured, you know what? Let me grab my fabric and the blog post, and let's go on this adventure together. All right, let's see what we've got. So we start right off with how
to sew an Elizabethan shift, or at least how I did so. Even back then, I was very
uncomfortable with the idea of telling somebody, "here's
how you make this thing," and I was way more comfortable saying, "here's how I made this specific thing." There's a million different
ways to do everything, so it's really difficult to say, "here's the one way "that you should definitely
do it," you know? I also call it a shift/smock/chemise. I didn't know which term to stick with, because they're all
used so interchangeably for this garment. Ooh, I've already found the first thing that I would definitely change if I were writing this today. I say, "fortunately I had plenty "of white lightweight fabric. "Ew, cotton, I know." Really? I was a college student with no money. It's fine that it was cotton. If I made a shift right now
today, a shirt, whatever, out of cotton, it would still be fine. It is a weirdly defensive thing that if I were to write this post today, I would say, "I'm using linen, "but cotton or rayon would
be perfectly fine too." Even polyester. It's nobody else's business what you make your shirt out of. Next up, start out with
your first piece of fabric. Mine is twice my height
from shoulder to ground. (light upbeat music) Oh, okay, I see. It's because it's a floor length garment, so I'm saying from the
floor to shoulder times two. Let's do that. And next I think is width. I did elbow to elbow. It is a little bit fuller
with this gathering than I think I want, so I'm gonna go just
a little bit narrower, maybe like bicep to bicep. Let's go for that. Approximately here to here. 21, 22, okay, so I'm going, I think I'm going to put this on the table where it'll be a little bit easier to cut, rather than doing in the air. All righty, now that I've got
it laid out nice and smooth, a little bit easier to
cut here on the table, I'm going to measure out that 22 inches, not counting the selvedge, because I don't particularly
love the look of the selvedge, so I'm just gonna cut that off. The nice thing about linen is that you can just kind of cut
right alongside the threads. Obviously you can pull the threads, that's another pretty common thing, but I find this to be nearly as good with very similar
results and a lot faster. So I've cut out my 22 inch wide strip. I'm gonna set aside the
other stuff for now, we will come back to that later. I don't particularly want
to keep the selvedge in, so I'll just go ahead
and cut that off now. Done with our selvedge,
so onto the next step. I have my body piece here, and my next instruction is
to cut a long shallow hole in the top for the neck hole. No measurements, no other
information provided. Now, if I were to write this, I would probably specifically say, "choose what you want your
shoulder measurement to be, "and then marking that on both sides, "and then cutting
whatever's in the middle." This one actually is six, and I'm gonna go just
a little bit smaller, I'm gonna go five, so that
the shoulder seam here is just a little bit more in. Yeah, I think that's a good plan. So something that I did not include in my original instructions
or original design was little shoulder
gussets to help reinforce the shoulder where it's
kind of an awkward spot to be turning this very narrow, shallow V of the neck line into the
rounded part of a collar. Putting in a little
triangular gusset there will help kind of make
it form the right shape, even though I didn't
do it on the original, and that is fine. There are excellent shirts both
with and without the gusset for this style, so you can
absolutely go either way, but I'd like to go ahead and add one, so I think I will do
about a two inch gusset. While this will be the finished
size of the neck opening, sort of, we're actually going
to cut a little bit further so that we can insert
that shoulder gusset. It doesn't even actually need
to be like a shallow kind of fish shaped cut, which
is what I did originally. You can just do a straight line. Shallow cut complete. So now I'm going to consult the text. Cut it down the middle in the front. I made it all the way
to like my belly button. That's excessively long. I mean, it's fine, it
doesn't hurt anything. To kind of middle of the
chest is probably fine. All right, center cut, let's go. So I'm gonna go ahead
and fold this in half. All I need to do is make a little nip, trying to make sure I'm
only grabbing one layer. Do a quick measurement check here. Made eight inches, probably about good. Ooh, before I forget, it does mention here that making a fish face is
not required, but it helps, so just in case. (light upbeat music) Been a long time since I've
done silly face things. There we go. It's good luck, I'm pretty sure. What's next? I sewed up the hem on
the opening in the front. Oh, on the opening in the front. I see, okay. So I went ahead and turned
under this edge twice, and then top stitch it with
machine, which is fine, but because that's like front and center, and most visible to me in the mirror, as well as I suppose other people, not that they probably
care, but I kind of care. So for my opening here, you could either literally
do a double fold, you know, do kind of a very narrow
fold, flip that over, fold it again, and then stitch this line, but I actually rather like
doing rolled hems for these. So you just kind of pinch
the fabric, and roll it down. So you just pinch it and roll, roll, roll, come on, there we go. Sometimes if you kind of
do a couple rounds of it, that'll help encourage
the roll to stay in place. So I'll prep a little section like this, and then wrap it around
my finger and stitch, so you end up with a much narrower than you could get if
you did the double fold. So let's go ahead and get this stitched. (light upbeat music) So I have finished up
that center front opening. For the neck gusset, it's just going to be a two inch by two inch
right angle triangle, and I will make two of those. Then I'll cut the remaining
little piece here, so that I have a place to insert that little triangular gusset. So this'll be cut more, but the triangle will replace
the section that I cut away. (light music) Now I am supposed to go
ahead and gather up the neck to fit the collar, the
collar that I don't have, and don't explain how to make. I mean, I guess I just assumed that you like look at the picture, so it should be, in theory,
the size of your neck. I'll go ahead and take the
remainder of my fabric here, and cut out a collar piece. I'll just measure around
my neck, and my old shift, the collar was just a little
bit taller than I quite liked. Let's go for about an inch, that seems to be a pretty good
average-ish neck collar size, although there are definitely
some that are quite large. So I mean, you're good either way, but I'm gonna go for a
narrow one this time. So here are my neck bands, like so, with a little bit of extra
room for seam allowance. So that is good. And you can see here that unfortunately, it's not quite big enough to
fit around this whole opening, so we need to gather this
up so that it'll fit. In my instructions from 10 years ago, I recommend using the sewing machine to do a really loose like basting stitch, and gather it up that way. You could do that, but honestly, this opening here is so small, I'm just gonna go ahead
and gather it by hand. We are just going to do
a wee bit of gathering, maybe just under a quarter
inch from the edge like so. Now one gathering thread
will totally work, but I do recommend two,
both back then and now. So what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna go get two
needles with thread, and we're gonna stitch them
together at the same time. I like doing it this way, because you end up with really,
really controlled pleats, whereas when you do just
one row of gathering, they end up getting kind of
wild, if that makes sense, whereas with two rows
of stitches to gather, they end up creating kind of a tidy line that just makes it much
easier to then sew a collar or whatever on top of it. If stitching with two noodles at once is understandably just
a little bit too fiddly, what you can do is take
just one of your needles, do a simple even running stitch, and then pick up your second needle and repeat the same stitch. Trying if you can, to
follow the same sort of up down pathway as the previous one, and then when you pull on these, they should have this
kind of like ridge effect where everything is pulled
up and down the same, because they were stitched the same way. So we are all nicely gathered
up and ready for the collar, but before I put that on,
I'm actually gonna go ahead and add the ruffle to the top edge, which means that I need
to cut out some more, very long strips, just like this to use for the ruffle part. On the original and in the blog, I mentioned that it's
about three to four times the size of the collar. You might want more if you want to do a true figure eight style rough set, but for this kind of a
more casual wear thing, nah, three to four is
gonna be pretty good. Now for the width of the rough, I made an interesting choice. I folded the rough in half, and then stitched this
folded edge into the collar. And I say here that if you want a more historically accurate rough, you should do a tiny little
hem on your rough piece. The downside of doing the fold
in half method, which works, but it is very bulky, and it'll have a much like more fine and nice sort of feel if you
do that rolled edge instead. Oh, I'm actually a little
bit pleasantly surprised. I mentioned that, you know, no matter which style of
edge finishing you do, make sure that you cut out your rough on the cross grain, so
that you have selvedge on either end of your strip, and not selvedge along the top edge. The reason that you want
to do that is, in part, it's period practice. From what we can tell, the vast majority of
extant shirts and roughs seem to have it so that the cross grain is what's going across the rough, rather than straight grain. And to some extent, people have noticed in like their personal experience, that linen is much more
likely to sort of scrunch up on the straight grain, which you don't want
your rough to scrunch up, you want it to like spring out, and be like lively and
fluffy as much as possible. In the event that your
ruffle strip exceeds the width of your fabric, and you need to put a join in there, now historically they would
have put selvedge to selvedge, and then whip stitched
these edges together. However, their selvedge was a lot prettier than our modern machine-made selvedge, so what I prefer to do is cut
these selvedges off like so, and then fold the edges opposite ways. So this one I will fold up, this one will go folded down, and then you just hook them together, these two edges, and finally
stitch from this side and from this side. And when you're done you should end up with a very fine, fine,
fine little tiny seam between your strip. Alrighty, so I have prepared
all of my little rough edges, both my neck rough and
the little wrist ruffles, so edges are prepared. I also ended up labeling them, just because I had a few too many skinny rectangular long
pieces on my table, and I was worried that
I would start forgetting which one was meant for which purpose. For fun I took one of my
little rectangular scraps, and did a machine termed hem, just to see what it might look like if I were to do the rough
with a machine rolled hem. Looks pretty good. Like, this is totally a fine hem. I think that whether you
want to do it by hand, or with machine, it works
just fine either way really. However, I don't recommend
doing the double wide strip, and then folding it half. Don't, don't do that. What I'm gonna do next now is gather up, just like I did with the neck line. I'm gonna go ahead and
gather up my rough pieces, so that they can then be squished down to the size of the neck
and collar band pieces. Instead of gathering the ruffle by hand, like I did with the neck line, I'm instead going to use my
very exciting pleater machine. I don't often have a
chance to dig this out, but it is a cool little thing that you can sometimes get on eBay for a lot cheaper than new, which is what I did a few years back. First, I get a length of
thread that is at least double the length of my collar piece, preferably a little bit
more just for good measure, and then I thread both ends of that thread through the first two
needles here on the left. So I have a loop at this end, and a pair of thread ends at this end. Then I'm going to carefully feed my fabric through the side here, and I will end up with two
nice and evenly gathered strips right at the end of my ruffle. This is so handy if you find
yourself doing this a lot. As I finish up getting all of these neck and wrist ruffles nicely pleated up, I do really quickly want to
show you what it looks like if you do it by machine. What you'll do is take your machine, and set it to a very long stitch length, and then you do two rows, trying not to get too much further than your maximum seam
allowance if you can, and then you grab the top two threads of your two rows and pull them tight. I really recommend doing
the double row of stitches whenever you're doing
a gathering like this. It just makes it so much more controlled, and less like wildly ruffly, which is really, really
hard to then stitch onto something else. Alrighty, so I'm gonna go ahead and get these sewn into the cuff pieces, but first to help get
things under control, I'm actually going to iron them down, so they're not so topsy turvy like this. So I just start on the gathered side. Kinda scrunch up the ruffle end. And so this is a whole lot easier to put into the collar pieces than this. This being flat makes it so much easier to take my pieces here,
sandwich it in between, and then stitch a line here. (upbeat music) So I have sewn around the
three edges of the collar band, and now I just flip them right side out to make my neck ruffle, as well as my pair of little wrist ruffles. Obviously you'd want to
very nicely make sure that all of your seam allowances
are completely poked out, and nice and neat, and
then iron these flat, but here's kind of the general look. I think it's gonna be very, very cute once the shirt is done. So I need to look at my
instructions, see what's next. So I do actually mention
here already a change that I'm like, hm, I
wouldn't do this again, but it is included in all the pictures, so of course I have to like address it, which is that originally when I first made the shirt right there,
I put a layer of canvas in the neck line as
well, because in my mind, ah, you need something
stiff to help hold it up. In reality, starch is plenty for that. I actually ended up later on coming and opening up the neck line,
and taking that canvas out, although if I remember correctly, I think I did so in a very lazy way. Like I didn't completely unstitch it, and unpick the canvas out. I think I just opened it up partway, and like cut out as much as I could. Not a very neat job, and the neck line is still
very bulky because of that. So next it looks like I'm going to take my little neck
ruffle collar piece here, and attach one side of it to the shirt that I gathered up a little bit earlier, fold down the other side, and then hand stitch that in place. Okay. It's kind of strange that I'm
doing all of this collar prep before touching the sleeves at all, but that's fine, all right. And next up for the sleeves, I need it to be how big, let's see. I don't say. I simply say attach the sleeves. They are long enough to go
all the way to my fingertips. It's just a rectangle, no fancy shapes. That's it. All you get for sleeve instruction. I am very amused at how
obviously uncomfortable I was in front of cameras and stuff. I couldn't like stand with a straight face and like demonstrate the thing. Instead I had to like make bizarre faces. Now I don't care, I'll make silly faces, but like it's with intention, maybe. Anyways, so the sleeve, it needs to be the length of my arm. The selvedge, if it's going this way, then you want the sleeve arm
to be going with the selvedge. I think? For the most part, the general rule, as I think of it, is if
it's going down your body, then you want the selvedge
to be inline with that. I guarantee that there's
absolutely exceptions to that rule. So I think that's what I'm gonna do. Let me find my selvedge. It needs to be this way. Yeah, like that. How long is that? This is very professional. All right. So shoulder to fingertips,
it's about there. So I will just cut a little nip. That way I keep that measurement. If anything, it might
be a little bit long, but it's better to cut your
sleeves a little bit long, put them on the garment, try it on, and decide that you want to
shorten them up a little bit, than to go the other way, right? There's my little nip, and
I'm going to do the same, just kind of following
the grain line down. So I have cut my length
like so, and let's see, it'd be great if I fold this in half and this just happens
to be the perfect width for the sleeves. That's not bad. It can go underneath my arms with still probably an inch
or so of ease around there, although usually you'll want
to toss a gusset in there, just for like excellent range of motion. But that's, I mean, it's
maybe a little bit baggy on this side. Although once it's gathered into a cuff, maybe it'll just be real cute. So I think I am actually pretty satisfied with this as a like starter sleeve thing, so what I'm gonna do is
cut this halfway mark that I folded into it, so that instead of being one
sleeve that's extra thick, it'll be two sleeves. And then from there, I
think I am actually ready to go ahead and follow the instructions, attach the sleeves, (laughs) which is to say I will sew
on the like shoulder area of this sleeve. Yeah, although now that I
think about it, damn it, I'm pretty sure the pattern actually doesn't include a gusset. Let me check. No, there's no triangle right here, like you would normally see. That worked okay for this one, because it's actually a
very, very wide shift, but because I made the
new one a bit more narrow, I don't think I'm gonna actually quite have enough play in there. Yeah I think I'm gonna go
ahead and add a little gusset. If I'm remembering correctly, the extant gussets averaged like between three to five inches, so I will cut a little square gusset, and sew it to one corner of the sleeve, kind of like right here. And you will, you'll
see what that looks like once I attach it to the shirt. (upbeat music) All right, so before I
stitch these shoulder seams, right now it's currently
just pinned into place, not actually stitched yet, I like to just double check that I've correctly arranged everything, so I make sure that this is in fact the outside of the the garment, and that the outside of the shoulder seam, or the gusset seam is all correct. I sort of re-verify things before I then go ahead
and stitch them in place, and I generally find
that to be very helpful to do always whenever you
pin something in place, and then stitch it. Just double check real quick that everything's where it's
supposed to be, you know? Alrighty, so I have attached
the shoulders like so, and now what I'm gonna
do is stitch the sleeve, including the gusset. So it'll get stitched in, kind of looking like that at the end. Oh, and my dog would like to come inside. Yes? That's what I figured. All right, so then I will
stitch down the side, but not very far. I'm probably only gonna
actually stitch to about here, because I want to verify that the top half of
this will fit me nicely, and I want to know
sooner rather than later whether or not that's
not going to be the case. I'm already pretty sure I'm going to have to add some
width to below the hips, but I'm 99% sure up here should be fine, but just in case, I'm gonna
go ahead and stitch it up, and try it on so that I can verify that the top half is gonna fit me okay. The shoulders fit just fine, although I think that
these sleeves are indeed maybe just a little bit
longer than I need to be. I can pinch off a whole two inches, and have still plenty of movement, and floof, and goodness, so
yeah, I think I'm gonna go ahead and just take off two inches. Next we have, the sleeves
are going to be gathered into the cuff, and then
gather the sleeve ends, like we already did. I think what I'm trying to say there is, gather the sleeve ends like
we did with the neck line. Not really like a great complete sentence. One thing I actually do really like about this method that I
worked with 10 years ago, was a lot of, I don't know, wrap that piece of fabric
around you, and see if it fits, and just use that as
your basis for sewing. It might not be perfect, and there'll be things
that make that really hard to replicate that exact same thing if you want to make the garment again. It's a little bit like
draping a garment on you, and just getting your fit that way without taking the pattern from it to keep as a reference for later, because it's harder to remake a pattern once you've already
stitched it into a garment, but not impossible, and
it's especially not so hard with such a rectangular
construction garment like we're making today. But I don't know, I like how
beginner friendly this is. You take the thing,
you put it on your arm, and that's the size that you cut it to. I could appreciate that. Maybe it's because I was a
beginner that I was like, yeah, that's the easiest way to do it. So for the cuff, I did again deviate. I'm doing a lot of that. For this one, I wanted
just a simple plain cuff, but now I would like a cute little ruffle to match the neckline, so instead of just simply
taking one piece of fabric and covering the ends of my sleeve, I went ahead and did the exact same thing that I did with the neck line. You know, two pieces of fabric with a ruffle sticking out in between. I have found a spelling error. I should have hand sewn
this part two, T-W-O. Alrighty, so the sleeve
cuffs are done, mostly. They're constructed. The last thing that we're
missing, however, is a closure so that they can stay nice
and tight against the wrist, looking super cute and pretty. I do mention a little
bit further down here that you could use hooks, buttons, or lacing holes to do
the collar and cuffs, so that you can close them. I think I am gonna go ahead and do lacing holes for this one. Let's hop to some eyelets. So to make my little eyelets at the end of each of
the cuffs and the neck, I'm going to poke them
with a little awl, like so, and I'm gonna try and aim for just right where the seam allowance
finishes inside the shirt. That way, for the most part, I'm only needing to
pierce through two layers, but the leading edge is still reinforced by that extra two layers of seam allowance inside the shirt. So I feel like that's
kind of like a primo spot, otherwise you can go a little bit closer to the edge if you'd like, if you really want to try and pierce through the seam allowance, so that you have four layers
all around your eyelet. That might be a good idea if you feel like your
fabric is just a little bit on the weak side, or like, you just, you feel like you really want that extra level of reinforcement. I usually aim for just past
it though and call that good, and then I am going to stitch a little row of stitches around the eyelet, you know, just past where I had poked. And then I'm going to whip stitch all around the eyelet hole. Now you can if you like
do a buttonhole stitch. I usually just do a plain one like this. Whichever one suits
your fancy is just fine. Alrighty, so this is
looking pretty good so far. The only downside is the
side is not quite enough, because I narrowed the shoulders. That means that I also
narrowed what was in the hips, which means that unlike
the original shirt, I am going to have to add some gorge to the side to help
fill in the empty space, but that is easy enough, and you know, absolutely period practice. You can do it either way, so don't say that like one is better or more accurate than the other. They both totally existed at
the same time, it's great. So I'm going to add
some big old triangles. I think about eight inches at the bottom should be
sufficient, so pretty narrow, and they'll just start
here right underneath where the underarm gussets stopped. (upbeat music) (cutting and sewing) So we now have two triangles to insert into the side seam, one with
a seam, and one without. They're both fine, totally reasonable, but it's really nice, because you can take a
long skinny rectangle, and then the parts that
you cut from one side, and the other, you can just put together to make yourself a second
triangle, which is great. So now we'll go ahead and stitch
these into the side seams. So my triangles they're both stitched in. As you can see, the edges are
longer than they need to be, so I'm just going to
do kind of a gentle cut to even out the hem. So now that our various
pieces are assembled, we just need to iron the
seam allowances open, so that we can then fell them down. Whether you're gonna finish your insides, or just leave them raw, a la like Victorian
construction techniques, either way, definitely
recommend ironing your seams, just because it'll make
the finished garments, especially on the outside,
look so much nicer. Ironing also means that it's
time to talk sponsorships. Thanks this month to the lovely
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lots of interior design ones, like the one by Lauren Cox with the basics for making your perfect space. I'm in this room a lot, so it's been really engaging
to watch each lesson, and then look around to see how I can try and incorporate those things to make this a more beautiful and useful space for me. Potentially also other places soon. Skillshare is such a cool concept. There's no ads, they're always
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Skillshare premium membership, and after that, it's less than $10 a month for an annual membership. Thanks again to Skillshare
for sponsoring this video. Definitely check them out. Now that the ironing is done, I can top stitch all
of my seam allowances. Whether you do it by machine or by hand is really maker's choice. I did about 50-50 on this project. The chemise was rather long, so I did a deep hem tuck
as you can see here, although really I probably
should have cut it higher, and then just done a smaller hem. It's way easier around the curves. I did the sleeve ties, but still haven't
tackled the neck closure, so I think I'm gonna do a sewn in version. Just open the seam up a bit, and then tuck in the end of the tape, and then tack it in place. Next I'm gonna add a bit of reinforcement to the stitching at the
end of the neck opening. I didn't do this on the
original 10 years ago, but I really should have, because I did get some
tearing at this spot. To reinforce, I just add blanket stitches around the bottom of the curve, and then stitch them together
with several long stitches, before covering those again
with blanket stitches. This should help prevent
rips, and is also found on several of the extant
16th century shirts, bonus. Oh, and we are done. Ah. It's very exciting. I had a
lot of fun with this project. It was really interesting to kind of, maybe self indulgently, look back and see what I
was up to 10 years ago, and the way my brain worked, the way I wanted to share information, and how similar or different that was to how I do it now. It's such an interesting thing. Not only did I have a lot of fun, I got a new shirt out of it, which I'm really excited to
put this into my wear rotation. I love linen, so it's just really nice to be able to add more
linen things to my wardrobe. I'm a big fan. One of the things that
has me pretty excited about this shirt is I feel like it's going to be fairly versatile. I wear a lot of dresses
with shirts underneath, and I think that this is
going to fit in beautifully. I guess we will find out
when I actually go ahead and try a bunch of things on with it, but I anticipate it'll work nicely. (light upbeat music)
