Making Basic Medieval Underwear

[Music] hello and good morning to you my beautiful internet apprentice friends I'm Morgan Donner and I am so excited to be in my newly reorganized beautified sewing room space and I'm doubly excited because it's going to be a sewing day for me it's been a while so I've had a few weeks to kind of think about and consider what new sewing project I'd like to do maybe what outfit I want to make and I have lists upon lists to look at I have fingers board upon Pinterest board to browse through but something kind of struck me that I think I've noticed before about myself and I don't think I'm unique I'm guessing that other costumers feel maybe the same way which is that I'll see 20 examples of an item and I go hmm okay and then I see one that's different and I just focus on that different one there is something about the the interesting the unique the different that is really easy to to focus in on and want to make projects for and there's nothing wrong with that but I think there's also some value in exploring the ordinary the common the everyday I jokingly mentioned on my sewing room video about my hashtag basic heart and you know I think that's the direction I want to go in some good old-fashioned hashtag basic garb and what is more basic than a shift or chamise or cam Isetta or smock or shirt all of which I will probably use interchangeably throughout this video so heads up for the past 2000 years it's been pretty darn common to wear white linen as your base next to skin underwear layer in order to help protect your outer clothing it's only very recently that we'd stop doing that me kind of wind a different direction so let's go ahead and get started on making a shift so there are a couple different ways that you could about getting your shift pattern one of my absolute favorites is to take a shift that I already own that's fitting pretty well make any adjustments that I might want for the new shift and just coffee its dimensions down on to the linen now if you as a new customer very understandably don't already have a shift to copy what you can do is grab any non-stretch no really non-stretch dress shirts and use that as a guide for your dimensions if you're feeling a little unsure I did that a lot when I was first learning to sew it was a really good sort of set of training wheels until I got my confidence up to just take the measurements myself and transfer them to paper and that of course brings up our third method which is to simply measure the body parts that you need and take those measurements onto your linen that's what I'm going to do today for a couple of reasons one I think it's very helpful for people to see how that works and two my piece of linen that I have left is exactly 60 by 60 inches and that's all I have so I need to be a little bit more careful about specifically planning out exactly how much I can cut for the different pieces so if you don't already have them you're going to want to grab a few quick measurements things like the width of the torso from shoulder seam to shoulder seam the bust circumference under bust waist the length of your arm for the sleeves I like my sleeves to end at the knuckle bones so that's where I measure to be careful when it comes to measuring the circumference of your arm though because it's tempting to measure the wrist however your hands and needs to be able to get through that sleeve first so I usually like to measure the biggest part of my hand instead of my wrist when it comes to measuring the elbow I also like to go ahead and bend my elbow which always increases the measurement by an inch or two and then the same thing with the bicep don't do a loose bicep measurement you want to measure it flexed or however it is biggest on you that'll ensure that whenever you're moving around in your stays later nope when you're moving around in your shift later on you aren't feeling constricted or too tight in some areas because you measured them at their smallest width you want to measure everything at its biggest now I will take those measurements and put them on to a bit of graph paper maybe I'll do it up nice and the computer for you guys which is really good for me since I need to double check that I even have enough fabric to continue I'm going to start out with the total fabric size then I'm going to add the items first that I really can't compromise on size with for example the sleeve width and length I really can't go much tighter or much shorter so I'm gonna do those first the width of the body is also relatively set in stone I can go bigger but I really can't go to much smaller notice that I didn't measure the length of the body earlier because I knew that the length would be termina by just whatever I had left at this point so it looks like it's gonna be about 44 inches which is great that'll end up about mid-shin which is a good length the very bottom bit here will become the side Gore's and this last little part in the corner will become either additional Gore's or I'll save it for a future project I'll decide later for those of you that have never done any pattern drafting I'm gonna break that down just a little more let's start with the body width using that shoulder measurement of 16 I'll add one inch for seam allowance and one more for good luck I just kind of really like even numbers and that is going to become the width of the torso the bigger you go here the more your shoulder seam is going to fall off of your shoulder it works either way most of my shifts are a couple inches down from the shoulder but I'm going to aim just a little bit higher up here if I can today for the sleeves I'm going to start out with the length of my arm of 21 inches and adding an extra inch for seam allowance to get 22 I'm going to use the elbow measurement that stretched elbow measurement to get the width starting with 13 at an inch for seam allowance and you know maybe a couple more because I do like slightly looser shift sleeves to get me a total of 16 now the wrist of course does not need to be 16 inches so using that hand circumference of 8 + seam allowance and ease tension up I'll take a little wedge out from the wrist to elbow and we'll just toss that up here under the arms completing our sleeve pattern the side cores are sort of a whatever is left 'game I'll start out with 8 inches below the shoulder because that's where the sleeves are gonna go and then just cut that diagonally across now that we have our pattern go ahead and make sure to double check all of your measurements particularly verifying that the bust waist and hips will still fit since none of our measurements so far have been using those to create the pattern if you have particularly wide shoulders but narrow hips or vice versa it's good to double check that everything is still going to work out for you now I can go ahead and cut out all of my various pieces now that I'm fairly confident that everything will fit just fine on the pattern [Music] so when I attach the side doors to my tunic I like hi hi Catherine hi can you move please okay so when combining the side doors onto my tunic edge here I like to instead of going straight edge on straight edge I like to flip the gore so that one the curve more nicely follows the the curve that you would want to have the bottom of the tunic and you're going to not have the bias sewn Tobias effect which means that that edge will stretch even more over time so this is a thing I like to do [Music] I'm using a running back stitch to sew the Gores and the body pieces all together I'm actually offsetting the fabric slightly because I'm going to fold this longer edge down on the inside to create a felled seam normally you would sew them at the same length and then trim down the smaller one but that's an extra step for a garment that doesn't need that level of precision so I might as well keep the extra quarter inch of fabric [Music] if you're in a little bit of a hurry or just otherwise we'd like to save some time by machine stitching some of these these initial construction seams are a pretty good candidate for that because you won't see them on the outside of the garment whenever you're done although I do still recommend hand stitching the felling seams since that part will be visible on the outside and a machine top stitch just never looks quite the same [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so we are all done sewing those Gore's on and felling the scenes down now normally I would have cut the shoulder of this sort of garment all in one piece from back to front but because of the limitations of my fabric size I did have to go ahead and cut the front and the back as two separate pieces so next up I'm going to want to combine those two together just the same way running stitch and then fell the seam allowance down [Music] [Music] [Music] now that the shoulder seam is all finished up my body piece is now one long piece and I can start attaching the sleeves to do that I'm folding the sleeves in half creasing the center point and then matching the center point with that new shoulder seam I'm going to sew that the same way with a running back stitch initially and then felling the seam allowance down in now that my side seams are done it is actually starting to look something like a tunic which is very exciting I love seeing projects as they get closer and closer to completion because they start to look more and more like the thing they're meant to be very cool so now I'm going to go ahead and try it on but before I can do that I do want to baste the side seams closed I'm not going to do the actual running back stitched yet because I want to verify that everything is fitting nicely and it be ashamed to undo nice stitching if I find out that I do need to give myself a little bit of extra room so just some quick basting in the black thread here all right so my basting stitches are all done my side seams are temporarily sewn together and then I want to go ahead and cut a hole in the top here for my head to go through I'm not a hundred percent short on exactly what I want my neckline to look like so if you wanted to you could just simply guess where you want your neckline to be but because I already know what dress this is going to go with or rather what dress pattern it's going to go with what I'm going to do instead is cut a hole just barely big enough for me to get my head through and no more and then I'm going to try this on and that dress overtop and Mark out the proper neckline as closely as I can to the dress that I know it's going to go with [Music] all right so now I have my new in progress shift underneath my dress if you don't already have a dress to use as a guide that's alright just guess but since I am lucky enough to have a a dress already what I'm going to do is trace around the neckline here use that as a guide for cutting and then hemming so that was not too bad I have it all marked out it probably would have been clever of me to wait until I had someone else in the house to help me mark especially the back it's a little bit hard with that over dress to do a lot of range of motion and particularly not without adjusting the line of the thing that I'm wanting to mark anyway so I was able to improvise and make a tool that I'm not sure was necessarily the most effective thing in the world but I was able to go ahead and mark off the back portion of the shift and now I can take this off and start hemming all of these oh and before I forget I am pretty happy with the fit so these basting stitches I can now take those out and do the proper side seam stitches I was a little bit worried that this was going to be too tight particularly around the bust but it's just right this is not a problem if you were to try on your new shift and it's either tight in the chest or really tight around the arm then you could add a square gusset here underneath the arm but I'm not going to worry about it [Music] so there are going to be some marks left over here from the pencil but those should come out with the first wash and this is the inside so if nothing else it shouldn't be terribly visible from the outside anyway definitely don't use something like a pen that'll bleed through so for the neckline here in order to turn the hem in I'm actually going to roll it with my fingers just by taking it in my hands here and then sort of mushing rolling it down this doesn't work with all fabrics but linen is usually a pretty good sport and happy about rolling so you can see here it's staying rolled and now I can stitch this [Music] and then you just keep on going along rolling as needed and wrapping it over your finger to do more stitching as you go however if you're doing a rounded neckline like I am here you're eventually going to come across a part of the neck where it's at a 45 degree angle or a bias angle and it's not going to want to stay turned the same way like it kind of will but if you're having trouble with any particular section what you can do is just fold it down as narrowly as you can and then use the needle to sort of tuck it down in and then hold on to that piece and do more stitching [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] all right so I'm all done after yard and yards of hemming all the different little bits and pieces that needed to be hemmed I have a new smock which is very exciting and what's cool about a good shift is that even though I did trace this off of one particular dresses neckline and I have a couple of dresses that are based off that same pattern so this will work pretty well with any of those even so I should be able to wear it with other dress styles because that's what I do I wear almost all of my shifts with almost all of my dresses some work better than others but you can still manipulate a round neckline into a square one if you need to or vice versa but this is just a really really great basic to have in your arsenal it's good for literally hundreds of years which is fantastic and I hope that you guys consider adding one to your own collection if you haven't already and if you are someone who has not done any sewing any historical sewing in particular a good rectangular construction outfit is a great way to start it's almost all straight seams you can really learn a lot with relatively low stakes and barrier to entry so I find these rectangular construction early shifts to be a really really good starter project thank you for joining me on my hashtag basic garb journey here I'm really excited to go to costume College at the end of this week but once I'm back I'd like to get started on a good basic solid normal everyday sort of dress the the foundation layer type dress that one would wear I'm thinking that I'm going to aim for I think late 1400s almost that really early Tudor style we'll see we'll see what I end up actually doing but I'm excited to get started and share it with all of you guys [Music]

Channel: Morgan Donner

Views: 218,022

Keywords: morgandonner, Morgan Donner, Morgan Donner's Sewing Party, Making Basic Medieval Underwear, medieval shift, medieval smock, historical chemise, rectangular construction, historical sewing, basic medieval pattern, drafting rectangular construction, making medieval clothing, historical clothing basics, sewing shift tutorial, medieval shift tutorial, sca, mysca, society for creative anachronism, sca sewing project, starter garb, basic garb, #basicgarb

Id: QK4wwQlML8I

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 14 2019