Author Archives: Rotraut

1840s Morning Dress Sewing Tutorial Part 4 – The sleeves

The sleeves were the most interesting part when sewing the dress, cut on the bias, gathered at the hem and forming a cuff with that gathering. By the way, I love over-sleeves! Of course, the sleeves are not easy to sew, only hand stitching will do the job. It took me two tries to get a nice result.

First, mark the rows for the piped gathering and fold the sleeve along the first row. Insert a cord and sew with a running stitch, after securing the cord with the thread at the start, leave loos at the ends. Repeat with the other rows.

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1840s Morning Dress Sewing Tutorial Part 3 – The skirt

The bodice (except the sleeves) is finished, so it´s time to sew the skirt. Maybe this step seems a bit complicated to you, as it did to me when sewing my replica.

At the back portion of the skirt a wide seam is turned in and this double layer is gathered into cartridge pleats, while the front portion is sewn on plain to the front from the fashion fabric, with a turn point at mark (2). Another pitfall are the seam allowances at the front portion, wide on the skirt, narrower on the front piece. I hope the pictures are supplementing the sewing instructions.

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1840s Morning Dress Sewing Tutorial Part 2 – The bodice

If you´re interested in sewing the dress you can purchase the sewing pattern via my Etsy shop. At the moment just a digital pattern version is available, the printed version is coming soon.

The first thing you should do is a mock-up of the lining layer. As you can see, mine got too short at the waist, had to add some centimeters. The armhole was pretty narrow as well, even with the seam allowances clipped. This picture was taken, when I was starting to take the pattern from the extant dress and adjust the pattern for my size. The original dress size is about EU 36, I need a size EU 42.

This is the back lining, with the back and side back from the fashion fabric lined up and basted in place. I tried to imitate the fine and regular back stitch from the extant dress, but I failed. Thank God, the print is hiding my stitching!

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1840s Morning Dress (Wrapper) Part 1 – The extant dress

Some weeks ago, I got this beautiful extant dress from the 1840s as a loan from a friend and – what a surprise – she asked me to make a sewing pattern out of it.

It is made from a fine block printed muslin and seems to be a very simple dress at first glance. At second glance, it offers many details, like the finest hand stitching I´ve ever seen, silk cord for piping and drawstrings and a very interesting sleeve cuff. To save as much fabric as possible, all bodice pieces are pieced, sometimes several times.

This kind of dress would have been worn in the morning, on hot summer days, or as a maternity dress, and is called a wrapper. Made from printed calico fabric, this style was worn by women of the working class during the pre-civil war era.

The original dress is completely hand-stitched. The fashion fabric is mounted on a tight-fitting, boned lining bodice and closes at the center front, the fullness of the front panel is gathered with drawstrings to fit the waist and kept closed with pins.

If you´re interested in sewing the dress, follow me to the next post.

The sewing pattern is available via my Etsy shop.

1890´s Skirted Jacket Part 1 – The Cut

Hi everyone!

In this tutorial I´ll show you how I made View B of my pattern #0520. The jacket is a pretty old project from the beginning of my historical sewing journey when I needed a coat or jacket for cold winter days. I browsed extant fashion plates, dresses and sewing patterns, decided to make View A of the jacket for my purposes. I developed the View B with the thought of a perfect winter jacket for history bounding.

First, some words about the pattern and how to cut all the pieces from the fabric. The maximum for my patterns are three sheets of the A0 format, sometimes difficult to realize for historical patterns. For this reason I can´t offer extra pattern pieces for all the pieces needed, sewing a historical dress or jacket, just trying to keep the pattern clear and easy to follow. Ever seen an extant pattern sheet from a fashion journal?

There´s just one pattern piece for the large leg-o-mutton sleeve of View A, with the smaller View B sleeves (or lining sleeves) integrated to the large one.

All my patterns come with a seam allowance of 5/8” (1,5cm), just where you can see the arrows (the back sleeve seam) you´ll have to add when cutting from the fabric.

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