Pintucks Ruffles Sewing Another Gibson Girl Shirtwaist Late Victorian Early Edwardian Blouse

I was in the mood for a quick historical sewing project and I thought I'd make another Edwardian inspired blouse, especially since I had outgrown the last one that I made. Blouses from the 1890s through 1910s are just absolutely beautiful and there are so many different designs that you can choose from. I'm going to keep it pretty simple for this one, it's just going to be pin tucks and a lace ruffle. The fabric I'm using is a light lilac woven cotton, a sheeting cotton to be exact. To start off with I created this paper pattern for my yoke on myself and then I cut out a rectangle of the yoke, including all of the shoulder seams and the point, and then as wide as the yoke pattern originally is, plus allowance for the pleats. So now it's time to go ahead and to pleat this piece first before cutting out the actual pattern piece. I'm now going to use the lines as a guide to press my fabric so that I can use those creases as a guide when sewing the pin tucks in place. I'm just going to use the edge of my presser foot as a guide for making my pin tucks because I want to keep them relatively small. So I've got about half of my pin tucks done and now I think what I want to do is to leave a little blank space here. I might add two more tucks here, I'm not entirely sure, but then I'm going to start by doing the other side first and see how far we're going to get. Starting out with our first tuck again, we're folding the fabric and then we're running that through the machine. All of our pin tucks need to be pressed. This particular fabric changes color a little bit under heat, but that's okay because it will cool down and go back to being purple. And now for the front piece, we're going to be pressing the pleats outward, so away from the center, which means that we'll be going the other way on the other side, so that both sets of pleats point outwards. For the puffed sleeves, I've decided to use one of the original patterns found in this book. Okay, so now I've drawn out the shape that I need my yoke to be. This is the front piece and now I'm going to cut the pleated piece of fabric to size. I want my yoke to be pointed at the center front, so now what I need to do is to again fold this in half as accurately as possible, and I'm just going to cut like so. I'm just going to replicate the front piece on the back, actually, except that I will be cutting the neck hole a little bit shallower in the back. It is literally just going to be a rectangular piece of fabric that's going to be gathered along the top edge. I have some wide lathes here which I'm going to cut in half lengthwise to use for my ruffle, and hand-sewn in place. The blouse was assembled. Right, so I have a little problem here, because I made the top bit far too long, and also there's some weird poofiness here that will need a dart, but that will be fixed once we fix the top bit. So as you can see, the ruffle sits quite low, and in most Edwardian blouses that you can see on pictures, and in most blouses from the era, the ruffle tends to sit a lot higher, so that would be a little bit more like this. I'm just trying to pull this up as far as I possibly can, but it doesn't sit quite right here. But then the problem that I have is that this bit is way too short, so I probably have to open all of this up again, and attach a longer, and maybe even a more voluminous panel, because I will, and maybe even a more voluminous panel, because I might want to have some gathering here, instead of it just falling straight. So I took the blouse apart again, and added a longer front panel that had some volume that could be gathered exactly in the middle, and then this time I also gathered the lace first, before inserting it into the seam, just to make the ruffle a little bit more even. But basically, I put everything back together and basted all of the seam, making sure that the fit was okay this time, before sewing it back together on the machine. To gather my sleeves into these beautiful voluminous puffs, I'm just going to gather the curved bit of the sleeve at the top of the shoulder, even though I'm not going to hold to the idea of taking up two threads and then skipping two, I'm going to try and keep my stitches as small and intense as possible, to get even and delicate gathers. Pro tip, never sew when you've done your nails. This is how far we've gotten with the blouse so far. At this point the blouse was only basted together, because I had taken everything apart, so I'm now going to sew everything back together properly. Look at how much lower the shoulders needed to sit. Next, I'm pinning the sleeves to the shoulders, making sure that the gathers are spread evenly. With this particular sleeve style, the seam of the sleeve is going to be halfway up the back of the shoulder seam. Now the sleeves can be attached. All right, so I asked my followers on Instagram whether I should leave the sleeves like this, and just add a nice little lace ruffle, and just have elbow sleeves on this blouse, or whether to add some fitted elbow cuffs, and the poll came out exactly 50-50, so that was not very helpful, especially since also the people who supreme their value most were also split on this issue. Honestly, I think the best idea would be to do the elbow cuffs, would be the more historically viable solution, and would also make this blouse a little bit more versatile, whereas the ruffles would make this an exclusive summer blouse. For the cuffs, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to take a large rectangle of fabric, and I'm going to add three cartridge pleats, and then we have the nice poofy sleeve, starting up here. Obviously, now I need to figure out how to make these nice and fitted, and I will probably have to add put a pin where my sleeve needs to be attached to the puff sleeve, and we're going to deal with the extra later, and now I just want to attach this to the puff, so I'm going to fold that in like so, and now what we're going to do is, we're going to find the seam on the cuff, we're going to find the seam on the sleeve, and we're going to match those two up. Actually, let's remove this ugly bunch of threads before we do that, which is literally just a strip of cotton with one pin tucked along its whole circumference, and I hand sewed that onto the corner of the blouse, similar to what I did with the sleeves, and then for closures, I added a button to each cuff, and some hooks and eyes in the back to close up the blouse, and here is the finished result. I'm really happy with how it came out, and I actually even have somewhere to wear it, which I didn't know when I started out on this project, but a friend and I decided to go to an Edwardian exhibition, and we agreed to go in costume, so I'm really looking forward to that, and also to having a chance to actually wear this blouse out. Thank you so much for watching, and I will see you next time!