Pixie’s Blouse

I’ve been needing, of course, a blouse to go with my ten-gore princess skirt. But if I’m going to make an Edwardian blouse, of course I want to make a lingerie blouse version. I doodled these concepts back in the winter, and while they aren’t exactly what I ended up making, I think they convey the idea.

While I won’t say my Victorian Sewing Circle has exactly rocketed to widespread renown, we have accumulated a couple of donations over the years. This blouse pattern was donated by a vivacious lady who goes by Pixie. She’s apparently well known in the local Society for Creative Anachronism, but slummed around with us for a little while. As I recall, she took the pattern from an original she had the opportunity to study while working at a museum in Prince Albert (a smaller city nearby). I had the opportunity to try on her version, so I thought it would roughly fit (give or take needing to add a bit to the waist these days.)

It’s a fairly basic shirtwaist pattern of its era, the main features being a dramatically V-shaped back yoke and some long, tapered cuffs on the full sleeves.

After some digging in the stash I turned up this white cotton with woven-textured stripes. It was a remnant from some other project, but I confess I can’t for the life of me remember what I made with it the first time. It’s perhaps a little heavy for a proper lingerie blouse, but deliciously soft and since I hadn’t remembered it existed, I was prepared to not be too precious about using it.

For the lace, I tested out some cotton lace, but in the end opted to use a not-completely-horrible (and much more sheer) nylon option I had a buttload of in stash. I don’t remember where it came from, but it’s always nice to have plenty to play with when tackling lingerie styles.

I wanted to make the pattern more or less as-is for this first go at least, but I really love the look of a faux-yoke in the front created by stacked lace (see the sketches) and carried on in the tucks beside it.

Now, fitting the entire shirt pattern on my limited fabric was an exercise in and of itself. So I was really excited to be able to add a couple of extra inches to the fronts to add some pintucks. Partly because would it even be an Edwardian blouse without pintucks? And partly because a fabric like this basically measures the tucks for you. And also I thought a couple of extra inches in the front wouldn’t be a bad idea since my bust is, ah, a little larger than when I tried on the original. I did have to cut the inner parts of collar, cuffs, and back yoke from different fabrics, but I’m not exactly short of small bits of white fabric for this.

I wasn’t sure whether to line the back yoke. On the one hand this reduces the overall transparency and delicacy of the lingerie blouse. On the other hand, this is a fairly high-stress part of the blouse. A quick scan through a couple of period texts didn’t cover yoked shirts. In the end, I went and lined it, for the stability.

After adding the lace “yoke” in the front I decided I wanted a fully lace collar. The lace I was using was just perfect for two widths to make the finished width of the collar as drafted. I did run into one or two hiccups though.

Firstly, I needed the collar to be a good couple of inches smaller than drafted. (Perils of skipping a muslin.) I attempted to compensate for this by adding a third tier of lace to the bottom of the collar, carefully eased to fit.

And secondly, I had to decide how to handle the front-buttoning placket. Most of the all-lace collars I’ve seen in originals had back buttons. And while the width of the placket fits nicely with the width of my lace, it’s pretty wide, which seemed a bit heavy-looking on lace alone.

In the end, I decided not to make buttonholes in the collar, but just to pin it in place; tiny snaps would be a good more permanent option.

While the blouse is lovely, I really think it is just a little bit too big all over. The collar is still pretty big, I had to hack a huge amount off the shoulders, the back length seems a bit long, and I think I would like the overall amount of volume if I took a solid couple of inches out from each side and beneath the arm. Partly this is because I’d added that extra volume with the released tucks in the front—but the back also seems oversize. Maybe I am just not good at dealing with puffy things. But that’s what you get when you skip making a muslin, even when using a pattern you had tried on (once many years ago). So the moral of the story is—make a muslin (or at least measure your pattern) even when you think you know.

And yes, I haven’t even managed pictures with my Edwardian skirt, because it’s wintery wool and it is no longer winter. I’ll try and post about it again once I take those pictures… and maybe figure out how to make the fit a bit more what I wanted.