Sewing Project: Viking-Victorian Shirt, part 1

I hate shopping for clothes.

I'm 5'11" and 205 pounds, not terribly curvy, and I have an abnormally long abdomen. This means I'm too big for "normal" sizes, but don't really fill out most plus-size clothes. Store-bought clothes are invariably too short in the legs, sleeves, and waist and too tight in the thighs.

Mmmm, stripes.

In the US, after years of trial and error, I found a few shops that carry basic items that don't look horrible on me, but in the UK, I'm at a loss. Up to now, my solution has mostly been to not buy new clothes, but after nearly five years, my work wardrobe is now looking a bit shabby.

In an attempt to remedy the situation, I looked through my fabric stash to see whether I had anything that could be turned into business casual attire. After a bit of rummaging, I turned up five yards of cotton shirting with a subtle woven stripe. I originally bought it thinking I would make a Regency gown, but I've carried it for something like 8 years across two continents, and I don't really have any 19th century costumed events to attend here, so I might as well use it for something a bit more practical.

The pattern woven into the fabric reminded me of the calicoes that were popular for dresses and shirts in the 19th century. Since floor-length dresses aren’t terribly practical for work, I sat down with my copy of Thoughts on Men's Shirts in America, 1750-1900 to look for some construction and design details.

Thoughts on Men’s Shirts divides its specimens into two broad styles: the roomy rectangular cut, and the more fitted French cut, which looks more or less like a modern shirt with set-in armholes and curved sleeve heads (not to mention the limited arm movement that goes along with them).

I have neither the large empty flat surface nor large rolls of paper to do any serious pattern drafting at the moment, so I want to keep the pattern as simple and rectangular as possible while retaining some of the characteristic features of a 19th century man’s shirt and making allowances for my not-especially-rectangular figure.

Your basic rectangular-cut man's shirt for most of the 16th-19th centuries looks something like this:

It’s cut almost entirely from rectangles. The body is one big rectangle. A T-shaped slash becomes the neck opening, which gets gathered into a rectangular collar. Two rectangles for the sleeves get gathered into rectangular cuffs at the wrist and rectangular shoulder reinforcements at the top, with square underarm gussets. If you’re interested in making one of these, there are some instructions from an 18th century tailor’s manual at http://www.marquise.de/en/1700/howto/maenner/18hemd.shtml. As it happens, those instructions give you a shirt that is nearly identical to the Folkwear Poet’s Shirt pattern, minus all of the silly ruffles.

For 21st century everyday wear, however, nothing says "weirdo" quite like a poofy-sleeved poet shirt with a big, floppy collar, so I decided to remove the extra floof from the body and sleeves in keeping with the more tailored look of the later 19th century.

The way humans are built, the half-circumference of the chest is a lot larger than the width of the shoulders. Consequently, if you cut the body all in one piece that’s wide enough to go around your chest, you end up with shoulder seams that fall somewhere around mid-bicep. To get shoulder seams that fall on the shoulder, you can cut the body piece to the width of your shoulders and adjust the sleeve length accordingly. But now you need to add that extra width back into the body, so you add side gores.

Funny, this is starting to look an awful lot like my standard tunic pattern...

The black tunic that I made from that pattern has become one of my favorite things to wear at home on the weekends, so I'm completely okay with using it as a starting point for my pattern. I’m not making a Viking tunic though, I’m making a Victorian(ish) shirt, so there are a few details that I want to change to bring it a bit more in line with a 19th century aesthetic.

One of the most characteristic features of a 19th century shirt is the neck opening. In the first half of the century, this could just be a simple keyhole neckline with a button at the top, but in the second half of the century, button plackets that open partway down the chest seem to have been a bit more common. (Shirts that button down all the way are anachronistic for 19th century re-enactment!) That told me that I needed to factor two extra rectangles into my cutting diagram, one for each side of the placket.

No self-respecting Victorian gentleman would be seen in public without a collar, but the starched collar was often made separately from the shirt and buttoned onto a simple band collar. It’s possible to make a band collar out of a simple rectangle of fabric, but they tend to sit a bit funny at the front of the neck, so this is one area where I’m willing to compromise and bust out my french curve to draft a proper collar piece. Or, you know, eyeball it.

19th century men’s shirts also featured shoulder reinforcements, rectangles of cloth stitched to the inside of the shirt body, usually reaching from the outside of the neck to the shoulder seam, so I added two more rectangles to my list of pattern pieces to cut out.

Unlike my tunic sleeve, I decided not to taper the sleeve toward the wrist, but to keep it a rectangle and pleat the excess fullness into a cuff. That means I need to cut out some cuffs too.

That leaves just one problem that I still need to address.

As you can probably guess by now, I love rectangular construction, but it tends to result in shirts with some awkward wrinkles and folds around the underarms on women's inconveniently curvy torsos. By the time you have enough fabric to go over the breasts, you end up with some excess at the neck, under the arm, and/or around the waist that needs to be taken out somewhere in order for the garment to lie flat on the body. You can take it out at a seam or dart (resulting in more complicated pattern shapes, which I'm trying to avoid), or use gathers, pleats, or tucks.

A significant percentage of 19th century men’s shirts have a panel of vertical pleats, tucks, or gathers at the top of the chest, near the neck opening as a decorative feature--not surprising, since that’s the only bit of the shirt that would be visible under a waistcoat. But I’m not going to be wearing this shirt with a waistcoat, and if I add pleats to the top of the chest, all that extra fabric will be released right over my belly, exactly where I’m trying to *remove* excess fabric. So instead, I moved the tucks down to the waistline where they will provide the fitting that I need. Just for fun, I staggered the height of the tucks so that they’re higher at the sides and lower at the center. Not only does this look rather snazzy, it means that the width of fabric being taken out of the body piece is greater in the middle of the tucks than at the top and bottom, mimicking the behavior of a tapered dart.

Since my pattern pieces were going to be more or less the same shape as my black Viking tunic, I decided to test the placement of the tucks by pinning them into my black tunic, and I soon found a flaw in my plan… If you look at the tunic pattern diagram, you’ll see that the side gores flare gently down from the underarm to the hem, giving you a little bit of extra width over the hips and butt. The trouble is, those tapered side pieces cause the nice, parallel vertical tucks to swing inward toward the middle of the shirt. In order to prevent that, I needed to keep the side seam vertical at least to the bottom of the tucks. I didn’t want to lose the extra fullness over the hips though, so I have to either flare the side piece out below the waist, resulting in the striped fabric creating chevrons over my hips, or I could find some other way of introducing some extra fullness at the sides… like, say, more tucks.

So instead of cutting my side panels as trapezoids, as in the tunic pattern, I'll leave them rectangular and add tucks that start at the top of the panel and end at the same height as the tucks on the body piece, where they'll release and give me some extra width over the hips. As an added bonus, because all of my pieces (except the collar) are rectangles, not trapezoids, hemming is going to be a breeze.

So, my final design consists of a tunic-length shirt with a band collar, a button placket that extends halfway down the chest, shoulder reinforcements, a body that fits smoothly over the shoulders, nips in at the waist with a series of tucks, and then flares a little bit over the hips. The full-length sleeves are fitted at the top, but full at the wrist, pleated into buttoned cuffs.

If you want to make this shirt yourself, here's how you calculate the finished size of all of your pieces:

• The body piece is the width of your shoulders and twice as long as the desired length of the shirt.
• The neck opening is an oval whose circumference is roughly that of your neck, placed slightly off-center so that it sits slightly closer to the front than the back. Just mark it without cutting for now, and start a little too small. You can adjust it as needed later.
• The shoulder reinforcements are somewhat arbitrary rectangles. They're roughly as long as the distance from your neck opening to the edge of the body piece and as wide as your aesthetic judgment says they should be. 3-5” is generally a good range, but smaller and larger shoulder reinforcements exist. 
• The sleeves are as wide as the circumference of your bicep, plus as much ease as you want, and as long as your arm from shoulder to wrist.
• The length of the side gores is the length of the shirt, minus half the width of the sleeve. The width is as much as you need to add to the body piece in order to go around your hips comfortably. 

desired hip circumference = 2x body width + 2x side gore width

Therefore, 

side gore width = (hip circumference ÷ 2) - body width

• The cuffs are the circumference of your wrist, plus enough overlap for a button, by twice the desired cuff width. You’ll need two of these. 
• The collar will start as a rectangle as wide as you want the collar, plus at least half an inch, and as long as the circumference of your neck, plus as much ease as makes you comfortable. Start with it a little too long, and you can trim it down later. You’ll need two of these.
• The placket is made from two rectangles as long as you want the front opening of your neckline to be, and at least 3 times as wide as you want the placket to be, usually between 1.5x and 3x the diameter of your buttons.
• The underarm gussets are 3-5” squares. You’ll need two of these.

Once you have all the measurements you need, add your seam/hem allowances, and play some tetris with your fabric.

The stripe pattern on my fabric runs lengthwise, so the body, sleeves, side gores, collar, placket, and cuffs also need to run lengthwise. The underarm gussets are square, so it doesn't particularly matter which way they run. The shoulder reinforcements are on the inside, so it doesn't technically matter which way they go either, but it looks awfully nice if they run lengthwise. Sure, nobody else will ever know, but *I* will...

My fabric measures 50” wide, and I ended up needing about 65" or slightly less than 2 yards of fabric with a cutting layout something like this: