Edwardian Summer Dress (Part 1): Making a Lace Yoke Silk Blouse

Hi friends. This is part one of a two-part project where I am making a two-piece Edwardian-inspired summer dress. In this video, I will be working on the top part, so technically I'm going to call it a shirtwaist. The same fabric and style and techniques, of course, are for both pieces of the dress, but these will be able to be worn separately in theory. So I'm getting a dress, but also a separate blouse and skirt that I can pair with other things to make more outfits. I know that probably a lot of you are sick of the late Victorian and Edwardian things from me and also the rest of CosTube, but I promise that after this, I have a bunch of other non-late Victorian and Edwardian projects coming. Anyways, I started by constructing the lace yoke. To do that, I took some lace and arranged it on my dress form to figure out what pattern I wanted the lace to be in the yoke. The lace I'm using here is crocheted cotton lace. I'm using undyed and unbleached lace for this because I thought it went nicely with the blue silk fabric that I'm using for the shirt. So at first, I tried to construct my lace yoke by machine by slightly overlapping the pieces of lace and running them under the machine, and this did not go very well, and I also didn't have any matching thread. The closest I had was a like bright white, which is not great for this slightly off-white natural undyed cotton. So I ended up constructing my lace yoke pieces by hand with pre-waxed ivory silk thread. The front of the lace yoke, I wanted to be in a chevron formation, so I created both sides separately, and then I sewed the two sides together by machine, and then I bound the edge in the middle with some cotton twill tape. I think this looks really cute. I don't yet have the pattern for the rest of the blouse. It's going to be the blue kind of light to mid-weight silk gathered into, well, the front and the back. So to talk a little bit about this project, this is a shorter dress, so I don't actually know if this is a thing that would have happened. Most of like the pictures and fashion plates and stuff that you see of the 19-0s is floor length. A lot of it is floor length. I feel like I should fact check this now, but I'm pretty sure that wearing trains during the day was a thing in the 19-0s. It kind of varies throughout history whether trains are just evening or not at all or day and evening, but I'm pretty sure that the 19-0s, they are a go for basically all of the time. They did have the kind of working woman's streetwear length skirt was much shorter, and I actually have two of those that I've made now. They're not in videos because I thought it'd be boring to repeat basically exactly the same steps and pattern, but just a slightly shorter skirt. The Edwardian streetwear length skirt is somewhere between kind of ankle length and tee length, which is a very practical length for a skirt to be having lived my life or attempted to live my life in both a Edwardian streetwear length skirt and a floor length skirt. Yeah, there's a big difference. For this project, I am sort of basing it off of a Edwardian lingerie dress, which are these beautiful, delicate, super lightweight, sheer, usually white dresses, but I'm doing it with a fabric that is not super sheer and also not super lightweight. This is, I mean, it's not like a heavyweight fabric, but it is not the super sheer insert photo, I guess. Some of the women's wear, kind of the like trademark Edwardian thing, is to have really sheer layers of white or light colored fabric and to build up opacity in an outfit with multiple layers of sheer fabric. So this project is very much inspired by the Edwardian silhouette and by the shapes and the patterning and the way the lace is placed and used, but I'm making it with this kind of thicker crocheted cotton lace, which isn't historically inaccurate, I think, but it's less common than much more delicate lace. And also, I'm using this fabric, which is thicker and heavier weight and less sheer. So together, this is going to be not exactly something that I've seen in an extant garment. So this is definitely not a historic recreation. This is very much inspired by history, but switching up the materials and colors and textures to make it more modern. And this is going to be a shorter skirt because I do want this to be practical for wearing in the summer, and skirts with trains, as I have learned, are not the most practical thing. For the body of the shirtwaist, I'm using a modified version of the pattern that I made for my original shirtwaist on this channel. I figured out what part of the pattern was going to be taken up by the yoke, and then I excluded that part and cut out the rest of the pattern, adding a bunch of width to allow for gathering into the yoke. After cutting out my body pieces, I pressed the top edge under about three quarters of an inch. I used cotton basting thread and a long basting needle to run a gathering stitch along the top edges. I gathered and sewed the body pieces onto the yoke pieces by hand. Then I trimmed out the neckline of the lace yoke pieces. Then I sewed the shoulder seams, trimmed the seam allowances, and cut the back open. The shoulder seam allowances get bound with twill tape. For the collar, I'm doing a thin standing collar that's cut slightly on a curve so that it hugs my neck. The collar is stiffened with one layer of linen canvas. I cut this without seam allowances so that it wouldn't interfere with the edges of the collar being turned under. I attached it to the lining layer of the collar with just one row of stitches by machine. I probably could have done a nicer job with this and done multiple rows of stitching or some kind of pattern, but I felt like getting this done, so we just did one row of stitching. Then I sewed the outer collar piece to the lining collar piece right sides together along the top edge. After trimming the seam allowance, I pressed the collar right sides out. So here we have the collar. I have tried to press under the bottom edges, so that's that. It went mediocre, but I think it'll be good enough because I really just need kind of a guideline of where that is. I also have not finished off the edges here because I don't actually know exactly how big it needs to be, but I am going to go ahead and attach it to my garment. So I've decided to finish the collar before I tackle the center back edges. I'm just going to fold this under and hand sew it down on the inside. That's my garage opening. I don't have a garage, I'm a child. That's my my parents garage opening. Now that my collar is all on, I'm going to trim these edges and bind the edge in this binding. So I sewed on the first side of binding, just like sandwiching the edge and sewing by machine, and it is so messy. I didn't realize how messy this would be. So for the second side, I am going to do a neater method. Then I sewed the side seams with a french seam. So for the sleeves, I don't want a ton of volume in the puff at the top, but I do want to have gathers at the top of the sleeve. You can imagine this is the underarm, this is this is your armpit, this is kind of the sleeve attaching to the body, and then here is your cuff. So to create fullness up here without having a ton of actual height going like up off my shoulder, I'm going to bring this out sideways here and make this wider rather than bringing this up. If I brought this up, I would get volume, like vertical vertical height in my sleeve puff, but I don't want a ton of vertical height. So I'm gonna mostly go out from here, and then I'm going to widen my sleeve down here just slightly so that I can gather it into a cuff at the elbow. The cuff will sit right right around here, just below the elbow bend. I don't think I'm gonna make a paper pattern, I think I'm just gonna put this onto my fabric and then draw a sleeve larger than this, but based off of this pattern. And this is the pattern that I used for my last shirtwaist blouse. Then I ran a gathering stitch by hand along the top of each sleeve piece and also along the bottom. Then I sewed the underarm seam, closing the sleeve into a tube. I leave a few inches at the bottom unsewn. The seam allowance is pressed open and the edges where the seam isn't sewn get hemmed by hand. Then I pulled the gathering stitches at the bottom of the sleeve to fit a cuff. The cuff is just a rectangle approximately two and a half inches wide and long enough to go around my arm with room to spare. Then because I was running low on time, I decided to backstitch the cuff on by hand. The sleeves are gathered and fitted into the arm side, again with backstitches. Then I did the back closure. This consisted of a few buttons and thread loops at the top, some hooks and eyes, and then sew-on snaps going down the length of the back. I needed to do buttons and thread loops because I made the neck hole slightly too small, so I had to add back in a little bit of room. Now this is the part where I'm supposed to tell you that I hemmed the shirt, but I did not. I don't really have a great explanation. I was on a time crunch and I decided that it didn't really matter because this shirt will always be tucked in, so I would like to hem it at some point, but it is not currently very high on my list of priorities. Anyways, here is the final shirt. Join me next time, which will be in probably not next week, but the week after, uh, when I make the skirt. Or I'll be making the skirt the whole time, but when you get to see the finished skirt. So yeah, uh, like this video if you liked it, and yeah, I will see you next time. Okay, bye!