Some more knitting for children (HSM '25 Pink, and a baby hat)

 I don't really do new year resolutions, but I do happen to have several for this year. To wit:

1) Finish more projects than in previous years.

2) Use more of my already extensive collection of sewing and knitting patterns / books.

3) Post more of my projects on this blog.

I'm happy to report that one of the two makes I want to share in this post now checks all three boxes! Well, not quite the "more projects than in previous years," yet; but I'm coming close to finishing with more projects, so I expect by next week I'll have surpassed 2025, and that's a good start on that one.

But first, the pink singlet / vest for my little niece which was my one lonely HSM entry for 2025:

 

I've decided that from here on out, my niece shall be referred to on this blog as Kitty. Not at all her name, not even close; just a public consumption pseudonym based on the fact we keep joking that she's like a little kitty - always aware of what's going on, always needing to be aware and present at whatever's going on and putting her nose into things. :-)

So. This thing I knit for Kitty was intended to be a singlet, to be worn as underwear. But the colour turned out to be such a perfect match for her that it ended up being used as an outerwear vest. And since I still have quite a bit of the yarn left, I think I might go ahead and knit a sweater for a future Kitty...

I intentionally made the whole thing in ribbed patterns, so that it could grow with her a bit. Originally, I thought I had a suitable pattern in one of my 1930s German magazines, but, alas, it turned out to be a pattern for a knitting machine and thus useless for my handknitting purposes. I didn't really see anything else I liked quite as much online, until I found a picture of a little girl in a singlet, and thought, yep, that's roughly the style I'm after. Unfortunately, no pattern, just a photo.

And then I lost the link, and found out I had very unconscionably failed to Pin the image, so, my apologies, I have no idea where it came from! It was a blog post featuring more 1930s knitted styles, if I remember correctly. The file name says "child in a singlet 1936" but, alas, that has also not helped me find it again. Neither trying to replicate my original search terms nor straight up reverse image search has been any help either... So all I know now is that it falls into the latter half of the 1930s where so many of the styles I'm drawn to now come from. :P

 

As you can see, the original garment actually used some sort of brioche stitch (?) in the body, and had crocheted borders around the armscyes and neckline. I had no idea how to begin with the more complicated stitch, and didn't like the idea of the added bulk crochet would add to the very lightweight single yarn I used in the knitting. So I ditched both. (I still don't fully understand crochet borders on knit using the same thickness of yarn. Must be me.)

The yarn is the same as in the blanket I knit for Kitty previously, just a different colour, and not held triple. (Also I have an update on the blanket that it's now clad in a duvet cover and used for Kitty to sleep under regularly!)

I messed up the armscye / neckline shaping and calculations a bit. Learning by trial and error, here! 

Just the facts, ma'am:

What the item is: A child's singlet

The challenge: 2025 #5 Pink 

How it fits the challenge: It's very pink!

Material: Linsieme Kirman, a cone yarn that's 92% merino 8% cashmere

Pattern: My own.

Year: 1930s (c. 1935-1936, based on my inspirations)

Notions: 2,5 mm knitting needles (circular)

How historically accurate is it? As I already said, it's not based on an actual period pattern. I think the construction and gauge are perfectly plausible; I'm less sure about the material.

Hours to complete: No clue!

First worn: This January.

Total cost: I got the yarn for free as industrial remnants!

 

Further knitting facts:

Yarn weight: Lace, at Nm 14/2 (700 m / 100 g), but I think it fluffs up into more of a light fingering style yarn.

Gauge: 8 stitches per inch. Forgot the row count.

Amount used: 43 g

 

And then I whipped up a quick project to be sent with a bunch of fairly random things we put together for Ukraine - I just hadn't managed to finish the blanket by the time my sister went to Prague with the things. So by the time I realised as much, in the two days I had left I made a quick baby hat, following instructions in a 1950s knitting book by Helena Dutkiewicz. I have a Slovak translation, but the original is Polish - it says Dziewiarstwo ręczne, but one copy of that I found being sold online only has children's clothing while mine has all sorts of things, so I'm not entirely sure what's going on there. (Also one of many examples of the ways I can kind of switch between all the Western Slavic languages in passive usage. Well, the three state languages, I have no experience with Lusatian. Polish is the hardest, but I can still glean a lot.)

Anyway, this one was labelled as a hat for a 6-12 months old, though I'm not entirely sure whether the sizing still holds up for today's babies. It tells you to use 3 mm needles and cast on 90 stitches for 30 cm, or whatever works for your gauge. I used 2 mm needles and cast on, IIRC, 80 stitches for 29 cm... Sooo. It's extremely yarn and personal knitting style dependent, and the "patterns" in the book all basically work like that. I actually like that about old Central European vintage knitting, although it also often involves a great deal of wild guesswork.

The yarn I used is a soft acryllic I bought years ago in a church charity sale. So this is a charity project through and through. :D

 

The construction is extremely simple. It's just, basically, a large Dutch heel in garter stitch. Then you pick up stitches around the face opening, increase in every third stitch, and knit a border / brim / flounce (it's not very flouncy). It's supposed to be a bit bigger, but I ran out of my ball of yarn at that point, and figured that I liked it as it was and that I did not want to attach new yarn at that point where it would inevitably be visible. Then you string a tie through the bottom - mine's just a crochet chain.

The knitting facts:

Yarn: A German acryllic no-name. Seriously, there's no name on the label, it just says "Garn" (yarn)! (Then a bunch of other languages, including Czech without diacritics...) JES Collection by J.E. Schum Würzburg, colour 130 (white). My guess is it's from the 90s or early 00s, but that's just a guess.

Yarn weight: 130 m / 50 g, i.e. 260 m / 100 g, based on a Ravelry entry for a similar-but-not-the-same yarn from the same manufacturer I'm assuming DK. Recommended needle size 3-4 mm, recommended gauge swatch 22 stitches and 28 rows for 10 cm. I didn't follow this.

Gauge: I forgot to actually measure it, I just winged it based on my mitered squares from this self same yarn, but it comes out at 7 stitches per inch in garter stitch.

Amount used:  38 g.

2025, and future plans

I've been writing down projects I've finished on a paper on a pinboard since... 2021 I think? I think I started doing it during lockdowns to make myself feel better. Well, the list for 2025 is fit to make one feel worse: there are only three items. And one of them is this:

- a tiny knitted Christmas ornament I made as a gift for the work Christmas party. I used two acrylic yarns from the stash (one destash from my mum, one bought in a charity sale) and two metallic / Lurex yarns from my huge yarn haul from my previous job. Did I mention that here? Yeah, I must have in connection to the baby blanket from last Christmas. So, yeah. That happened and now I have SO MUCH YARN and so much knitting to do. So this was also a bit of a proof of concept for me for working with those metallic yarns. I declare it quite successful.

Also, it's a tiny thing, but it still took me about three hours to make, so it's not a quick thing, necessarily.

But that short list of three finished projects is a very misleading review of things, because there was quite a bit more I worked on in 2025 - I just hadn't managed to finish most of the projects by the end of the year.

As a most striking example, there's the singlet I knit for my little niece that is already finished - all that's left to do is to sew it up and give it to the intended recipient. Photos to come then.

This I can / want to show. I'm working on a sontag for my grandma from the same yarn that baby blanket was made in. I currently got fed up with it but on the whole, it's a very exciting project because - you may notice I have that 1860s knitalong badge on the right. It's been sitting there since 2010, a reminder of a failure. It didn't work out for me back then; a big part of the problem were terrible old circular needles. Also, I think the yarn wasn't that great either. I have nice new circular needles now, and a yarn that's almost too luxurious (although it tangles a lot in its current unwashed, doubled up state). I recalculated the pattern a bit to work better with my gauge, and of course it won't be in the original design, with this marled yarn (is that what it is called?). But I WILL finish that sontag! Soon! Soonish!

I got fed up with it right now, though, so today I reached for a ball of mystery yarn from that same haul, and started knitting a Monmouth Cap. Well, a modern version. Here is the pattern. I started a hat from the yarn last year (I think it was), trying to figure out a historically inspired top-down construction. But it wasn't working out the way I thought it would (it was far more flying by the seat of my pants than I realised at the time, life's been A Lot), and it was sitting in the naughty pile. Then, going through my Ravelry library today, I realised this yarn was the perfect gauge for this pattern (well, not row gauge, but that's par for the course for me), meaning this pattern was perfect for this yarn and my intentions for it, and off I go. Unlike the written pattern, I'm doing the whole thing on DPNs, and because I don't think I'd have enough yarn if I made it as written, I intend to make the body of the hat an inch shorter. It should still fit me and work for me as a modern winter hat.

There's also the mitered square blanket (separate squares this time) I'm making out of the acrylic I'm never ever gonna wear. It's intended as a baby blanket to be sent to Ukraine. One of the yarns I used turned out to actually have wool in it, and a number of my finished squares shrunk in the wash, so I need to make more. Again, it even could have been finished in 2025, were it not for that. (Well, and the priority Christmas gifts took.)

So that's some of the things that should be finished soonish in 2026, and if all goes well, this year will be better on the finished projects front than last year was.

Of course, things going well really isn't a given these days...

HSM '23, Ch. 12 - Paired to Perfection: A pair of mustard-yellow fingerless mitts

 

I wanted to have these finished during my summer vacation of 2023 - when Leimomi came visiting and we took photos in historical clothes in historical backdrops... and then the mitts took longer to make than I had hoped, and I lost yarn chicken with the ball of yarn I had with me on our travels. So they only got definitively finished in January of 2024. (It's always the weaving in of ends that takes forever because procrastination.) Aaaand I'm only posting them here now. I have quite a lot of blogging to catch up on.

The yarn I used comes from the same deadstock haul the yarn in the baby blanket I made last year came from. This one is a 28/2 merino; preeeetty fine (I have a couple in 30/2, too; even finer). I doubled the yarn because undoubled it would be a recipe for madness, and also because the few fine wool items from the period of around 1800 I did find (most of them in the V&A) suggested to me a gauge closer to that. Here it's about 10 stitches and 16 rows per inch - I'm always proportionally higher on the row count than the usual 3:4 ratio.

I knitted the mitts according to info I found online in lots of places - both people's descriptions and pictures I peered at. I'm not certain I got it right, but at least I made a good stab at it. My favourite thing about this historical mitt construction as I've inferred it is the way the long body of the mitt is shaped - much like with historical stockings, you do the shaping along one line down the garment, on both sides of the "seam"; in this case, the "seam" is on the outside of the arm, opposite the thumb. It's easier to do than trying to distribute it evenly all around, and actually looks quite good.

Like so:

In this lightweight yarn, the whole pair used up only 44 g of it. Which makes it rather funny that I lost yarn chicken with it anyway. It goes to show that these were truly made from remnants :D - my ball was pretty small. 

* * *

I have quite a lot of this mustard yellow, actually. It's a colour I'm not sure would look good on me as a main garment close to my face, but for historical accessories, it somehow seems close to perfect for me. And yellow is such a cheerful colour.

I reeeeally want to make yellow stockings now. Do I have any use for Renaissance stockings? Nope. But I want to do it For Reasons. Also, I do have Knitting with the Modern Maker, I do want to make more than just socks out of it. (Given my short thick-ish legs, I was thinking I might have to adjust the pattern, whichever pattern I end up using; and then I remembered my row ratio and thought, maybe that would actually end up perfect.)

If I feel particularly crazy, I could turn this yarn into a sweater, and dye it into a more suitable colour... probably not. I also have this yarn in other colours, though. One is a perfect match for a beloved thrifted turquoise-ish turtleneck sweater that, alas, got shrunk in the wash years ago (I had carefully put it in the laundry storage area separately, someone grabbed it with the regular stuff anyway). I am about 99% certain that sweater must have been made from the exact same yarn, considering the yarn's industrial production origins. So there is one definitely madness inducing knitting project in my future. I think the original was indeed made from a single yarn; I'm not doing that, but a sweater on 2 mm needles will be bad enough.

For now, I started with modern socks, just to see how this yarn wears in something less madness-inducing - and to see how I feel in wool socks with zero polyamide in them. :-) There was recently a very funny situation when my mother and me met up for a brief spot of knitting in the park, we pulled out our projects... and they were both mustard yellow. :D With the difference that mine was a sock in this yarn, and hers was a not-sock in a regular modern sock yarn. :D

* * * 

I'm honestly not entirely sure how I made the thumb gusset anymore...

 

I might write up something about making fingerless mitts like this once I am more certain I know what I'm doing. I did write it up, but currently it's just notes for me to remember what I did - it needs a more substantial treatment for something presentable to the public. I do have a lot of yarn to use up, so I do intend to make more - also to go well with different outfits. (I have a lot of fabric to use up, too...)

Just the facts, ma'am:

What the item is: Fingerless mitts
How it fits the challenge: It's a pair. Strictly speaking, they're not paired to perfection, there are imperfections between them... but they're minor. :D
Material: Thin merino cone yarn, doubled (Filati Biagioli Modesto Lambswool extrafine 28/2)
Pattern: My own
Year: c. late 18th-early 19th century
Notions: 2 mm double pointed needles (in reality they're more something like 1,85 mm)
How historically accurate is it? I'm not sure; it's as good as I could figure out, but it's not perfect. I'm not sure if my thumb construction is correct (or more precisely, I'm pretty sure it could be done better). And I'm not sure how accurate the yarn is for my timeframe. (Merino definitely already was around, but I have no idea if they would have made yarn exactly like this out of it, or if they would have used it exactly like this exactly for mitts. Very fine wool yarn did exist, but I'm not sure exactly how fine we're talking.)
Hours to complete: No idea :O
First worn: In January 2024, as they were finished, just because. :D I got quite a lot of wear out of them in Autumn of that year with modern clothes - they do make a great addition to your wardrobe in changeable weather or cold rooms, and having the fingers free while staying more toasty is indeed great.
Total cost: I got the yarn for free! It's old unused stock remnants from work that was sitting in storage and being a moth hazard.

 

Further knitting facts:

Yarn weight: Lace - as mentioned above, Nm 28/2, i.e. 1400 m / 100 g; doubled. So gauge equivalent would be something in about 700 m / 100 g.

Gauge: c. 10 stitches and 16 rows / in

Amount used: 44 g

Experiments in Woven Bras, Part 2: The Front-laced Specimen

This is a very belated continuation of my first post of this "series". At this point, the front-laced specimen is already worn out and torn out of use, and has been for several years.

It ended up not fitting perfectly - that's the danger of using a well-used old bedsheet with quite a bit of give in it for fitting a muslin of a closely-fitting garment, I think! I completely forgot about that. So if you venture on this sort of journey yourself, use new fabric for your muslins, not old bedsheets? They're fine for more loosely fitting garments, which is why it did not hit me.

 

Also my figure has changed again. My six centimetres in the bust are back. Frankly I quite liked my sewing D cup, I was used to it, so I'm quite happy to have my six centimetres back. :D

(It's actually also in part to do with the undergarment I'm wearing when taking my measurements, as I found out by putting on an old swim top experimentally. That one got me back down to roughly the minus six measurement, but obviously with a different silhouette. Don't underestimate your undergarments.)

Still, this wearable muslin successfully got me through the summer of 2021 and served as a very good jumping point to finally get it right, figuring out what worked and what didn't. The pluses and minuses.

Minus: One of the major things that didn't work was the fit.

One, I accidentally made it too small in the (front) underbust (totally the fault of overfitting in a fabric with too much give), which is of course where it eventually tore.

Two, the princess seams sat too far out towards the back rather than going over my apex (again, I suspect, the result of overfitting in a fabric with more give).

Three, I put the curved seams on both sides of the princess seam which makes for a bust shape that's rather... Regency. :D (Pointing out to the sides, I mean.) Potentially useful discovery in reference to Regency/1820s stays with princess seams*, but not really a look you want to be sporting in your everyday 21st century life!

* (Modern princess seams usually have the centre piece cut fairly straight and the side pieces accommodating the bust curves, a close look at the famous Musée Galliera short stays shows me it's the other way round around the year 1820.)

As mentioned in Part 1, this is actually the adjusted pattern that led to specimens 2 & 3. But it illustrates the point.

Four, the back turned out to need a bit of taking in at bottom centre in order to really sit flush against my body (and provide even better support). I think that was, in this case, because I stand up much straighter when my bust is properly supported than I did when I created the original pattern (while probably wearing a rather badly fitting bra). However, I also ended up having to take the back in in my experimental Regency wrap bra and in a more recent bra created from a basic block from FreeSewing.org; so I think this particular detail may also have something to do with my recent suspicion/discovery that I have a comparatively narrow back compared to my front and my overall measurements. Not in terms of the over-the-shoulder-blades measurement that's usually considered "a narrow back", I think mine's kind of average for my overall size if not even a bit bigger (I think I do have a bit of a round back going on). But right underneath that point, at the bust / underbust level. Which is precisely what leads to these close-fitting garments having to be taken in at the back - I need to take a wedge out of the bottom hem for proper support.

Plus: Which brings me to a thing that did work in this first bra instance - it did support me. Zero bounce. It kind of flattened my bust, probably sort of in the early 20th century style that this ended up being, and it worked. At least until the whole thing started shrinking and then falling apart... (Or was that due to my bust measurement reduction being only a temporary fluke?)

Minus: Which brings me to another thing that didn't quite work - when I say zero bounce, I mean zero. Zero give. A bit of elastic does come in handy. It's telling that even many Edwardian brassieres did have elastic in the sides...

 

Aertex bust bodice, c. 1900s, the Underpinnings Museum, ID: UM-2017-001 Photo by Tigz Rice.

For the sort of physical activity I got up to at work (quite a bit of raising arms to reach above my head, actually), a bit of elastic around the straps turns out to be something useful. Not fully elasticated straps like in modern bras, those are annoying... Elasticated sides turn out to be something from the past we should not have done away with!

So yes, those are features I worked into the next step in the evolution of my woven bras.

 

Plus: What I did quite like about this specimen was the front closure. It didn't work perfectly because I had a fairly short string to lace it (working from stash here, folks), so putting it on was still a bit annoying, and the lacing isn't ideal for wearing under fitted tees. But a front closure really is very nice in terms of not having to fiddle with things blindly while contorting your arms behind your back! Even though by now I'm used to that action and did end up making bras with back closures as my default, I think I also want to try my hand at front-closing ones - both simply because it's a nice alternative, and because, well, accessibility: I think exploring that process could help other people.

Neither quite plus nor minus: I decided that on all future brass I would make the "band" part - the underbust part - a bit deeper/taller so that it grips the underbust better and provides a better "counterweight" to the bust. It wasn't a problem per se, but it is even nicer to wear that way, especially because in these unstructured bras the bust tends to slide down a bit when it's not so flattened. This, I suspect, is an experience anyone with a bust bigger than a C cup is familiar with.

 

The construction process for woven bras like this is pretty simple: sew the seams, cover the seams with tape (bias for the curves), finish the edges by taping, attach straps. The elasticated panels I started making in later instalments add a complication, but it's still essentially the same.

In this one, I inserted cords into the folded hem at centre front for added strength, and then added handworked eyelets for lacing. The straps, which in this case were just pieces of plainweave tape, I attached with flat-felled seams for a neat and sturdy finish. On principle, as a simple woven bra from a quilting cotton-type fabric, this construction works very well. Everything else I built on top of this basis from now on is just a variation on the theme.

My right strap, in the front, is another place where it started tearing, which I think I can confidently link to all the arm-raising and lack of elasticity.

Further observation: As I suspected, strengthening the centre front in some way and potentially adding more shaping to it also does seem to be rather crucial if you don't want to end up with a monoboob. It's not an accident that Regency stays and Victorian corsets had busks or at least boning down the centre front!

This also happened to be a HSM entry back in 2021, so here's a very belated blog listing for it:

The Challenge: HSM 2021 #3: Small Is Beautiful

What the item is: An experimental 1st part of the 20th century bra.
How it fits the challenge: It's not a big item. And it's a pretty necessary part of the whole outfit looking beautiful...
Material: white cotton plainweave
Pattern: my own; the back was hacked from the pattern of my sleeveless spencer, the front is the result of a lot of measuring + muslin fitting
Year: 1910s-1930s.
Notions: cotton bias binding, cotton twill tape (I suspect a blend, actually), cotton plainweave tape, cotton thread that's two 2-ply S twist Z-plied (Hagal), cotton thread that's 3-ply Z-twist (Amann) because the previous turned out not to agree with my sewing machine so I've relegated it to handsewing duty, beeswax for waxing said handsewing thread, twisted cotton cord for cording and lacing (for now, I may change it up eventually)
How historically accurate is it? Meh. It turned out to be a sort of wearable muslin that's all and nothing and not entirely correct for any decade (the whole lacing with cording part takes its cues from even earlier garments, I suspect). But I tested out the pattern (needs tweaking but works very nicely) and the theory of vintage bra construction I've derived from looking at lots of photos of originals on auction sites (because those are usually nice and show details of the insides), and I think I'm definitely headed in the right direction here for being able to make 1930s-style bras for both modern and vintage wear, and hopefully also an even more correct 1910s-style princess-seamed bra.
Hours to complete: Not sure. It took several days, not of full sewing, in part because my machine was acting up (which thankfully turned out to be a thread problem)
First worn: ... not sure which day exactly it was, I've now been wearing it for about two weeks. (June 26 2021)
Total cost: Cost of materials lost to the mist of time. But it would not be much. 

 

Next up: Another dead end. The first elasticated attempt which with all the adjustments for that it took waaaay longer to make than it should have and remains unfinished and abandoned in favour of simpler, better fitted, more sturdy specimens. I made it in a fabric that was too flimsy. Woven bras are one garment type that quilting-type cotton is perfect for! And I planned the placement of the elastic in the elasticated section wrong, so it did not have the necessary grip in that area.

I'm going to document that attempt even when it failed, because it's still a good demonstration of the principles of woven bras that I discovered along the way. As the Czech saying goes, mistakes are how you learn.

A baby blanket

This was the big project of 2024. It seems a bit unimpressive to sum up my 2024 projects with this flat rectangle of kniting, but there is quite a lot of work in it!

I have a niece now. This was made for her. The yarn comes from a HUGE haul of old cone yarn I got for free at work a couple years ago - unused yarn that had been sitting in storage for years and being a moth hazard. This particular one is Kirman by Linsieme, a 2-ply 92% merino 8% cashmere which, amazingly, survives machine washing. I tested that by running a sample repeatedly through the machine at 60° Celsius. So I knew it would be perfect for a baby project - soft and washable.

It's a mitred square blanket made more or less using the Knitting Squirrel tutorial - but I used the same yarn throughout. Kirman tripled. And size 4,5 mm needles. There's 40 squares starting with (more or less, depending on how I managed to pick up the stitches in some of them) with 40 stitches. Then I finished the whole thing off with a crochetted border in doubled Kirman, two stitches per stitch so it formed a bit of a soft rufle.

Not much else to say about this one really - other than I finished it at Christmas at grandma's, and she loved the yarn, so we agreed I would make her a sontag out of it. I believe two strands should be just the right thickness of yarn for the Godey's Lady's Book 1860s pattern floating around. Just the thing to keep grandma warm when sitting next to a window, as she does! I'll probably have to adjust the size - I do have her measurements from back when I was making a dress pattern for her. 😁

#HighQualitySockContent

Just. You know. Socks.

Handknit sock yarn socks. They are, as my sister said, addictive. And she's only wearing them!

This is the newest pair, following The Modern Maker's principle of "Italian / antique heel", but not following either of his patterns directly; I did my own thing. The patterns are here, and in the book Knitting with the Modern Maker Vol. 1.

I still need to tweak it a little bit, but I'm satisfied that I've got something very workable. Wearing them right now and they're very nice and fit almost just right; I just feel like I need to change them around the heel a little bit more. Or maybe I made them a tad short. I suppose once I have something I would deem perfect, I might have to write it up, with proper credit of course?

This pair is 68 stitches on 2 mm needles. Yarn is Best Socks by VlnaHep (Czech company), colourway 7118 - no longer available. My gauge with thinner 4-ply sock yarn on 2 mm is about 9 stitches per inch; not sure about row gauge.

There's more nice new socks I never posted about here. I've just realised some of them were HSM entries and deserve their own post, though.

This pair, also featuring Best Socks 7118, plus Drops Fabel 108, went to Ukraine early this year. 72 stitches, again 2 mm needles. The idea was to make them fun and colourful. I don't know where they ended up, the person going there had more destinations, but I hope they did and do help brighten someone's day.

These were my first attempt at a Balbriggan heel, last year. Yarn is Sportivo by Vlnap, but it's from a "mystery packet", not their regular production which is all patterned - there wasn't even a colourway / dyebatch number. 64 stitches and 2,5 mm needles.

I like 2,5 mm for lighterweight but still durable socks, but compared to my previous pairs in different yarns, these exhibited some considerable superwash stretching - ended up at about 7,5 stitches per inch and honestly that's not great in this yarn. Lots of loose fluff quickly accummulating around the heel. Now they have also been accidentally dyed in the wash and have lost their bright blue colour. I don't particularly mind, see about the stretching and stuff. Also I made the pattern up as I went and it's not perfect. Good learning experience, not entirely the best socks. I did like the colour, though, so I am somewhat sad to see that go and I think I need another bright lighterweight pair like that. Not the same yarn, though. (Not that I can get it anyway.)

(Hashtag title courtesy of Matt and Tom.)

HSM '17 #2: The c. 1800 sleeveless spencer / bodice

No, that's not a mistake: it really is a make from 2017 (in its final finished state). There's really a lot I've never gotten around to blogging about...

Once upon a time, I fell in love with the 1802 portrait of Heinrike Dannecker by Gottlieb Schick, and decided I wanted to make an outfit inspired by it - really possibly my favourite portrait from the era, fashions-wise, as I've already mentioned.

Then later I came across two other portraits involving sleeveless bodices that I took inspiration from: this ca. 1795 miniature by Augustin Dubourg and the 1800 portrait of the Comtesse de Bonneval by Anne-Louis Girodet de Roussy-Trioson which was good for figuring out how the front would sit at a slightly later date than 1795. :-) (Links to Pinterest because the original links are broken.) - Yes, they're both blue worn over white dresses. My colour bias is showing.

I had some fabulously shiny cotton satin upholstery fabric that I had snatched up from a remnant bin and that seemed to want to become this sleeveless bodice. Red! Shiny for evening wear! So wonderful.

I played with the pattern for my transitional "bra" to turn it into a front-lacing bodice, and as I placed it on the fabric, I thought "maybe I could squeeze two things out of this fabric" and pieced the front to accommodate a more tetris-style pattern placement.

I ended up shifting the grainlines in the three front-and-shoulder pattern pieces in comparison to the "bra". Since it was my own experimental pattern it wasn't exactly set in stone anyway but:

 

I find that shifting grainlines when altering and piecing historical patterns is actually mostly OK - as long as you keep your grainlines mostly the same / symmetrical on both sides of the body, don't remove bias from where it serves a purpose, or don't put bias somewhere you really don't want to stretch out! (Which was actually why I shifted it on the shoulder strap pattern piece: I wanted it lying nicely along the grain. That oddly shaped front bit got its grainlines shifted just for the sake of placement on fabric, though.) When loking at the patterns in the priceless German disertation on the Kostümsammlung Hübsch by Johannes Pietsch, I realised this was done historically, too, with pieced garments. So in that context, you can totally shift grainlines away to your heart's content!

I sewed the bulk of the seams by machine because I was excited and wanted to finish this bodice faster than my previous historical makes (four years is a rather excessive precedent and is stretching one's patience, once the undergarments are already done). Then I got the bright idea to fell stitch / whipstitch (?) the seam allowances down, which turned out to be not very brilliant actually because it resulted in ridges on the outside (thick upholstery fabric). But I kept it that way while I was ahead...

The lacing eyelets were rather a pain. The thick upholstery fabric was so hard to make proper awl holes in! And deciding to use buttonhole silk twist didn't help - it's bulkier. Though also neater, even if mine turned out to be lighter in colour than the fabric.

Thankfully, I decided to lace it with a cord I knitted myself out of cotton crochet yarn, with two stitches only (just like lucet, without a lucet), which is thin enough to pass through the resulting tiny eyelets (a large blunt needle in place of a bodkin helps, though, although it also passes through with more difficulty).

I spaced the eyelets as suitable for spiral lacing - although looking at Comtesse de Bonneval, I clearly could have gone with a regular criss-cross placement; I somehow forgot that part. (I need to work on keeping my inspiration images and sources before me throughout the process of working on things because that sort of thing happens to me far too often.)

I made a thread bar on the inside at the top edge, also from my buttonhole silk, to tie one end of the lace to. The bottom end of the lace I originally usually led back up underneath and tied to the thread bar again as well. When I had a not-lacing-tight kind of day (like when I wore this over a modern bra to church...), I just tied that end off at the bottom. Then that became the norm because my bust had grown about 6 cm since I first made the bodice... and now I've lost some cms there again, though not the full 6. But that's the flexibility of lacing for you! :-)
 
Originally, I only finished all the edges with piping. I don't even think it’s historically correct for the period anymore (maybe it's only an 1810s-onward thing?); and in either case, the folly of using an ahistorical thick upholstery fabric this way became apparent soon: the fabric ripped / unravelled in several places at the edges in the first wash, before I even had pictures taken. (All the photos in this post were taken during the restorative process or afterwards, I have zero pictures of it in the only-piping state...)

ETA: The problem is that, in order to turn the seam allowances around the curves, I had to cut them quite narrow and - well, the thick fabric is simply not suited to that sort of treatment, together with the thick turn of cloth it puts too much strain on it, and the fact it's a satin (= a somewhat looser weave) did not help...

 
I was grumpy about it for a bit, because it ruined the clean look I was going for, but then I caved in and added more trim to save it / cover it up: bias strips whip-stitched (fell-stitched?) to the piping & stitched down with backstitch on the other side, and bias binding at the lacing holes in the front.

So that's the whole of the lesson of not using historically accurate fabric and historically accurate techniques. :P

(More historically accurate fabrics would also likely result in the historically accurate wrinkles one can see in the portraits...) 

ETA: Notice that the bottom edge, which isn't so curvy, survived my piping treatment unscathed, presumably because I did not cut the seam allowance as closely as I did around the curves and the lacing holes at the front openening.

Anyway. Despite the problems, I'm happy with it. I'm particularly happy with the basic shape of the pattern, because that looks exactly the way I wanted it to look. It looks so good I could not believe it when I first saw myself in the mirror and later photos... It sits just like the bodices from the portraits. It's a very satisfying experience to get that result without the jumping board of a pattern taken from an extant garment, with something you just kind of eyeballed.

This is a photo by Páv Lučištník, so far the only good one I have of myself in full Regency getup... my tendency to forget to put on jewellery strikes often! :D So does my "RBF"; for some reason the photos of myself from the events that I know of always make me look bored even when I know I was anything but! Here I was looking at the people dancing and apparently previously tried to take some photos of my own. It's back from the bodice's first outing in its altered state in February 2017. I think I need to revive that headdress style...

So I'm totally going to one day make another one in similarly rather inaccurate cotton velvet, with hopefully more accurate construction techniques. I was originally thinking of a blue velvet remnant, but now there's the Purple HSM challenge and I thought back to the purple velvet... and there's Vanessa's oh-so-pretty printed cotton one... aaand I have some thrifted silk garments intended for repurposing as accessories... so, considering how easy it is to make this garment out of remnants, I suspect I'll eventually end up with a wide choice of sleeveless spencers to spice up my Regency ensembles. :D

I also want to eventually share the pattern (because it turned out so well!), but this post has been in limbo long enough and I don't want to keep waiting till I finish digitising the pattern... especially because it occurred to me that with how simple it is, it may be a good training ground for improving my grading skills...

 

Just the facts, ma'am:

What the item is: “Regency” bodice / sleeveless spencer
The Challenge, and how this item fulfils it: HSM '17 #2: Re-Make, Re-Use, Re-Fashion. I used trim to save / cover up fabric damage.
Fabric/Materials: Marked down remnant of red cotton upholstery-weight satin (NOT recommended, with emphasis!); navy blue lightweight cotton sateen for trim (pretty great!)
Pattern: My own, an evolution of my wrap stays / brassiere.
Year: c. 1800
Notions: red thread (polyester, I believe), dark blue cotton thread; red buttonhole twist for the lacing eyelets & a thread bar on the inside which I tie the lacing to; dark blue cotton crochet yarn knitted into a lacing cord; thin linen cord for the piping.
How historically accurate is it? Meh. Fabric is wrong, some of the methods are wrong (it’s even partially machine-sewn). On the other hand, the shape is pretty spot on on me, so that’s a plus. Also, the Re-Make part is pretty good: using trim to cover up damage is a valid thing, bias strips as trim are valid as far as I know, and the handsewing stitches I used (backstitch & fell stitch) are valid.
Hours to complete: No idea whatsoever. Sewing down the trim at one armhole (cca 52 cm) took about 1,5 h, I think?
First worn: In the original state, for the first and the last time to a production of King’s Speech by the National Theatre in Brno (an occasion that seemed to call for an evening dress, so I used the best I had :D). In this new iteration, to the “All in the Garden Green” ball held by Jane Austen CZ on February 25 2017 in Brno-Tuřany. And then many times afterwards, not all of them historical occasions, either.
Total cost: Low. I don’t remember how much any of the materials cost anymore, but in any case, the red fabric was marked down and I only used about half of it, the blue was cheap to begin with and I only used a bit of it, and there wasn’t much thread or yarn used, either. All in all, I’m guessing about 70 CZK ( = less than 3 USD)? The cost would go up if I did it more correctly and used a thinner, historically accurate fashion fabric coupled up with a linen/cotton lining.

Just a pair of stockings

I'm finding out this blog has been sadly neglected in the past years and there are lots of things I never posted about.

Like my stockings. Which I already made a couple years ago, for some HSM challenge or other - if I dug through the Facebook albums in the HSM group, I'm sure I'd find it, but I don't particularly care to do it right now.

It's my first attempt at sewing historical stockings (well, second, after a sort of rough mockup of my pattern), and they're nothing special in execution, wonkily sewn and not particularly historically accurate (there's lycra and machine sewing).

But they look the part.

And they contain three different tees, two thrifted, one of which was my orange tee from years ago after it stretched out of shape (and that's why I no longer wear lycra tees because if you don't have a dryer, they do sooner or later stretch out of shape while line-drying.)

The other thrifted tee was just bought specifically to make up for my lack of fabric in my original white tee.

That was my white Latvian tee, made in Latvia, from back in 2011. It got yellowish with use and also a bit stretched out of shape. (Don't believe people who say lycra assures your knits will retain their shape.)

So they are, in a way, a sentimental object.

And I'm currently knitting a wool(-ish) pair for colder days, so I decided these needed to be posted for the sake of painting the full picture.

My garters are two layers of plainweave cotton tape, paired up with vintage ribbon from my grandma. (I could have sworn I blogged about them and other stuff when I got them, but apparently it's one of a myriad of things I never blogged about.) I had ideas of embroidering some satin to put on the tape to make them really pretty, but that never materialised. So far.

Because it's "found materials", one of the ribbons is slightly different from the others. I actually rather like that my ribbons are mismatched and that my stockings are pieced. I often enjoy the mismatched and pieced items in museum collections more, because they have more... character, than the picture-perfect gowns that people are oohing and aahing over on social media...

 

Which reminds me - I've been pondering joining Instagram because that's where all the cool kids are these days, and when I blog I spend this huge amount of time writing blog posts that no one then comments on. So I eventually started reading their Terms of Use, where they keep talking about how it's aiming to be a personalised and up-to-date service, and yet somehow they fail to mention what it actually is, in the several paragraphs I got through. I backed out again at that point because a service incapable of telling you what it is that feels the need to instead keep wrapping pretty words around the fact they keep tabs on you... probably isn't something I want to sign up for, regardless of how many costuming friends are using it (and regardless of how many online services these days do the same keeping tabs thing). I've never been one of the cool kids anyway, why start now?

Throwback: The Andrea blouse and pattern

This dates back to the era of BurdaStyle as a website for OpenSource patterns, and BurdaStyle as a sewing community. Digging back, it seems I made this blouse in 2008? Definitely finished it in 2008. It predates this blog, and was actually one of the first items of clothing I ever made for myself... preceded by a "medieval" (ha-ha) dress and an evening dress! I always had a habit of jumping headfirst into sewing projects without regard for the order of their perceived difficulty ratings. :D

In retrospect, it's absolutely no wonder I've developed the sewing persona and habits I have if, out of the first three garments I ever made for myself, one was drafted based on a scaled draft, one was made from a heavily altered pattern, and one was a completely new design drafted from a basic sloper! There's no way I was ever going to end up the sort of sewist who buys and has to try all the newest patterns! :D

 Old photos demonstrating that my habit of wearing headscarves is already more than ten years old... and that my problem of finding well-fitting RTW trousers is a lifelong one.

That era of BurdaStyle as a sewing community is now definitively gone. Just like the blouse.

The physical object no longer fit me, and was worn and the colours washed out... so recently I cut it up and am in the process of turning it into patchwork pillowcases for my sister. Well, technically, I would be far more in the process of if the project were not currently 180 kms away...

(I wasn't even in the habit of visiting the BurdaStyle site for the past couple of years, so I was surprised to find out it was completely remade when I ventured there recently - I'm not sure when the change happened. But everything is gone. It's truly and fully nothing but a shop now, and as you can guess from the previous paragraphs, I definitely don't need it.)

This blouse was my first pattern of my own, drafted from a basic sloper (provided back then by BurdaStyle user JJ), based on my own design, my own idea, and so it will always be special.

The original idea counted on colour blocking or at least several colours / patterns of fabric, which I eventually scrapped in part because I did not have that many coordinating fabrics of the same type. I also played with the idea of back lacing which I think was quite "in" at the time (also, hey, I've always loved historical costumes), and scrapped that because, well, back lacing isn't very practical.

Also I named it after the little girl who was baptised the day I finished it, so even though I'm not sure how many times I've even met her after that, it is a rather specially named pattern that way.

 And as you can see, I eventually adjusted the back seams to echo the front more. It's much better balanced that way! And more fun! I dislike patterns that have inventive designs in the front and boring standard seam / dart configurations in the back.

The blouse used to have a record on the BurdaStyle site, including a single-size PDF download of the pattern, but as I said, that is now gone, and the record only lives on in the Wayback Machine  - without the PDF (and including my early confusion concerning invisible zippers if you go further back in history :D - it was a regular one). Plus there's my old Czech blog post - now picture-less. ETA: Actually, now that blog is gone, too (the platform is gone), and only lives on in the Wayback Machine.

I forgot to take more photos than these original ones before I took it apart. So you only have my word for all the beginner mistakes I made... such as trimming the seam allowances too fine as I zig-zagged them (together, too, I suspect - you can kind of see that it even affects the fit in the back), before I even tried it on properly. It wasn't that a big problem with this piece, but it's not a habit you want to maintain in general. :D

There's also the matter of my not knowing anything about understitching - so I topstitched around the neckline instead. Again, not a big problem with this casual blouse but not a habit you want to get into in general!

And somewhere between my forgetting some details from the drafting tutorial, the block I used having come without sleeves, and my generally not yet knowing the wisdom of measuring patterns against my own measurements, the sleeves originally ended up a tad too tight - so the underarm gusset was a necessity. One I fell in love with, though. :D

Looking at these photos now, and remembering how I did things compared to what I now know about my usual adjustments, I think I probably should have lengthened it in the upper part / lowered the bust point / raised the shoulder seam, too... I suspect that was also part of the reason the sleeves originally ended up too tight. Not having done that, however, does make the resulting pattern a bit more usable as a general pattern. :-)

... I kind of forgot about my old Czech blog; I don't use it anymore because that old Czech platform is pretty clunky. I now found out there that the thrifted pillowcase from which I made the blouse cost only 5 CZK (!!!), and that the yellow fabric I used for the teeny piping along the sleeves cost 10 CZK (and it cycles back to today because I think I have now used some of that fabric for face masks...).

That blog post is also a bit cringe-worthy because I had frankly no idea what I was doing or how to write about these things in a logical manner. :D

Pattern!

I retained my habit of drafting patterns on newsprint ads for many years after. I don't do it anymore, in part because we don't end up with them in the mailbox anymore (or only rarely maybe?). But it's actually not such a bad habit - if you don't mind drafting on already printed things and having to peer closely to see your lines! :D (I would always do the final markings in a black pen.) Re-using useless stuff isn't a bad thing to do; these days I still have a habit of e.g. taping together office papers printed from one side...

Here's the original pattern, as-is: Drafted at Burda size 38 in the bust (88 cm), c. size 36 in the waist (66 cm), widening back to size 38 (94 cm) or even 40 (98 cm) for the hips; the bodice lengthened in the waist to fit my long torso, and pretty narrow sleeves. No seam allowances.

Download original Andrea blouse pattern

I have an ambition of turning it into a more standard-size multi-sized one - but I'll leave that for the future (because it would hopefully also involve sewing a new version for myself and doing some sort of tutorial!).