In 2014, their blog had a theme: 52 Weeks of Historical How-To's. Every week, a member of staff (or some enthusiastic volunteer) would choose an item from the collection and use it as an instruction manual to do or make something, and write about the experience. Some people baked, others brewed, some made paper cut-outs, others took baths, some made ink and paper, and still others went on holiday.
For one of my contributions to the blog, I dug up an 1825 tailor's manual and followed the directions to make a lady's shift. That blog post is here.
A few weeks later, I decorated it by following (more or less) an embroidery pattern in an 1825 ladies' magazine. That blog post is here.
Unlike when I write for this blog, however, I have deadlines when I blog for work. And hand-sewing and embroidery are not particularly conducive to meeting deadlines.
In order to finish those posts on time, I had to cut a few corners with my linen shift. I only bound portions of the seams that would show in the photos or that were necessary to complete the construction (i.e. where two seams intersected), and it was never hemmed. Those embroidery motifs, messy though my work may be, took me nearly an hour apiece to stitch. There are more than 50 of them. Needless to say, I did not finish all of them before the blog post was scheduled to go live.
This was not helped by the fact that while I was working on it one evening, the ball of snowy white cotton that I was using for the embroidery tumbled off of my lap and into a pile of ash from the fireplace. I tried to wash it off as quickly as I could, but parts of it stubbornly remained brown.
The crochet cotton that I'd used is readily and cheaply available in the U.S., but difficult and expensive to obtain in the UK. I couldn't bring myself to chuck out half of the ball because a couple of inches here and there were stained--at least, not for the sake of a piece of underwear that would never be seen in public (apart from on this blog). So I just carried on embroidering for the sake of getting it done, and accepted that bits of the embroidery would be less-than-spotless.
I had also cut the neckline just a smidge too low and wide for decency, and without a pair of stays to hold everything in place, it has a tendency to fall off of my shoulders.
In other words, this project had enough problems that without a deadline to motivate me, I lost the will to work on it.
Three years later, I decided that it was time to get this project out of my backlog and into production. It became my train project. Every day, I sit on a commuter train for 50 minutes in the morning, and another 50 minutes in the evening. I discovered that I could just about finish one embroidery motif in 50 minutes, which meant that I could finish up to two pattern repeats in a day. There were plenty of days when I just couldn't bring myself to look at it on the train, or there simply wasn't enough light to embroider in thee evenings, but eventually, I embroidered all the way around the neckline.
To solve the problem of the neckline being too wide, I took the same crochet cotton that I used for the embroidery and crocheted a simple lace border directly onto the neckline as follows:
Instead of making a foundation chain, I made the first round by poking the crochet hook directly through the fabric, around the narrow rolled hem. The first round used a slightly modified V stitch:
Round 1: modified V stitch: ch 5 (counts as first dc plus 2 ch), *dc in same spot, leaving 2 loops on the hook; skip a space equivalent to 2ch, then make another dc and dc2tog, 2ch* all the way around; sl to join in third chain of the round.
Round 2: space for ribbon: ch 5 (counts as first dc plus 2 ch),*1 dc, ch 2* in next dc2tog of the previous round; sl to join in third ch of the round.
Round 3: picots: ch2 (counts as first sc), sc in same spot, sl in 2ch space, then *(2 sc, 2 ch, 2 sc) in next dc, sl in 2 ch space* all the way around. When you come back to the half-picot at the start of the round, after your last sl in 2ch space, make another 2 sc, 2 ch in the same spot where you started the round, sl to join.
Cut thread, and weave in ends.
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| Round 1 of modified V stitch, showing the wider spacing around the inside of the curve. |
To finish, I ran a narrow ribbon through the 2nd round so that I can use it as a drawstring if I want an even more modest neckline. Plus, it looks pretty.
The stained bits of embroidery are still there, but the shift is very comfortable, and I'm really pleased with how the crochet neckline came out.
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