Machine Sewn 18th Century Shirt Video (and some hand sewing links)

I've finally remade that shirt tutorial I wrote back in early 2020! That post has been the one I've linked people to for years when they asked about shirt construction, but it was never meant to be a complete tutorial, and my technique has improved somewhat since then. 

I made a video version and a written version, which I've wanted to do for a long time. Both are longer and more thorough than the original blog post, but the video has a bit more information. I don't usually do both, but for this one I really wanted to be thorough.

The written version turned out very long, so it's in 3 parts, not including this post.

Intro, Video, & Hand Sewing Links - You are here!

Tutorial part 1 - Pattern & Cutting 

Tutorial part 2 - Construction 

Tutorial part 3 - Ruffles 

They aren't quite as painfully detailed as the video version, simply because you can cram more information into a video, but still pretty good. (And I can come back and edit them to add anything I may have forgotten to put in the video, or to add better photos of some bits.)

If you are hand sewing your shirt, don't use the machine sewing methods! The most efficient way to do something by hand is usually very different from the most efficient way to do it by machine!

Burnley & Trowbridge have a series of videos on how to hand sew an 18th century shirt, but they don't have a playlist for them, so I made an unlisted playlist with those videos and added some more to the end, for ruffles and buttons. 

They do their shirt in quite a different order from how I like to do mine, and I really would encourage people to put the sleeve on first and then finish that seam and close up the side & sleeve seam afterwards.
I know they're basing their construction off of what they've observed on extant garments, but I speculate that the sleeve order in that case is probably because if a bunch of people in an 18th century workshop are making a shirt then it's more efficient for one person to work on the body, and 2 to work on the sleeves, and then you can sew them together at the latest possible step and have it done more quickly. But if you're one person making one shirt by yourself, it's much easier to put the sleeves on first!

I do my hand sewn shirts in the same order as I do my machine sewn ones, but you may prefer a different order.

For hand sewn ruffles, here's their video on rolled hems, and on rolled whip gathers. Rolled whip gathers are so, so nice. Time consuming, but such a beautifully fine and perfect way to attach ruffles!

They can go right on the edge of a narrow hem, and can be removed without any little bits of fabric left behind. You can use this method for sewing on lace too.

Some more advice for hand sewing shirts:

• Use a backstitch for the construction seams and a whipstitch for the felling. Make sure the underside of the backstitch (with the longer, more untidy threads) is on the side you will cover with the felling. Most of the shirt is just backstitch and whipstitch.
• For gathers, press the un-gathered edge and lap it over the gathered one and do tiny whipstitches, putting one whipstitch through each gather. It will look so nice. In my opinion this is the most noticeable difference between hand and machine sewn shirts.
• The collar and wristbands are folded wrong sides together and have the edges whipstitched, rather than being sewed right sides together and turned, like I did in the machine version.
• The shoulder & side seam gussets are whipstitched on too.
• The shoulder strips are apparently backstitched on, a little ways in from the folded edges?? I think this is weird and I don't like it, but I'm sure they must have had a reason for doing it that way.
• On some earlier portraits you can see that the bosom ruffle doesn't break in the middle, and is in one long continuous strip around the bottom of the slit! This is much easier to do by hand than it would be by machine.
• There are a lot of different ways various things are done on various extant shirts. There are multiple things on my shirts pinterest board that I find weird and confusing, and I think you should do whatever makes the most sense to you without worrying too much about it.

Machine Sewn Shirt Tutorial Part 3 - Ruffles

This is the third part of my machine sewn shirt tutorial. For hand sewn ruffles, see the links in the intro post. 

Intro, Video, & Hand Sewing Links 

Tutorial part 1 - Pattern & Cutting 

Tutorial part 2 - Construction 

Tutorial part 3 - Ruffles - You are here! 

Hand sewn ruffles are added after the entire shirt is finished, but for machine ones you need to add them earlier in the process.

I just did samples for these, rather than making an entire shirt, and I'm afraid I'll have to resort to screenshots again because I completely forgot to photograph the steps. As I said in part 1, it's impossible for me to remember to photograph something when I'm already filming it, which is why I did a separate shirt for the written tutorial.

If you want to use lace, cottonlace.com has some wonderful stuff! An 18th century shirt ought to only take 2 metres, or maybe 3 at the very most. If your only choices are synthetic lace or plain fabric ruffles, I would advise going with the plain fabric ones, because I find nylon lace just never looks right. (But if you're not going for a historically plausible look then you can do whatever you want, it's ok!)

If you're using fabric for your ruffles it should be finer than your shirt fabric. On a lot of portraits you can see that the ruffles are translucent, while the shirt fabric is not. 

Isaac Sweers by Cornelis Troost, 1730's.

Portrait of a Member of the Van der Mersch Family by Cornelis Troost, 1736.

Jeremiah Williams by Christian Gullager, c. 1780's.

And with modern linens being so much coarser than historical ones, every time I've added ruffles in the same fabric as the shirt it just looks kinda bad and clunky.

I recommend cotton organdy for shirt ruffles, as it's fine and very crisp, and stays crisp through quite a few washings. Best to get a swatch first, if possible, because some of them can be extremely off-grain and is therefore not very good for even rectangles. I was going to link to Renaissance Fabrics's cotton organdy, but it seems that they're currently sold out.

Cotton lawn works too, and is not quite as sheer or as crisp. I'm going to show some of both in this post. The lawn can be cut by pulling threads, just like the rest of the shirt, but the organdy is too stiff for that. But fortunately organdy tears pretty cleanly, so you can tear it into strips and then trim off any little fuzzy bits.

(Do NOT use silk organza, it's not the same at all and will go very soft and limp after washing.)

You can hem the ruffles by carefully folding the edge by hand like I did with the narrow hems on the rest of the shirt, but that will be quite slow. I highly recommend getting a narrow hem foot for your machine, if you haven't got one already.
It will be so much faster, and you can pre-hem a bunch of long strips and keep them in with your trim for when you need to add ruffles to something.

I hadn't used mine before, but found a video on how to do it. It took a bit of practice to get good hems.

You take a few stitches into the end of the fabric and use the thread tails to guide the edge into the foot, folding over a bit that will form the hem. If not enough fabric is folded over you get a little frayed edge where the second fold should be, and if too much is folded over then it makes a lengthwise wrinkle in the hem.

This one's cotton lawn from my stash.

I was having a fair amount of trouble getting it even at first, but then I tried folding over about 7 mm and pressing it first, and that made things much easier.

For cotton organdy, it went a bit wobbly when I ironed it, so instead I used a bone folder to crease the edge and then just pressed it with my hands.

I was getting a lot of wrinkling on these hems, and I eventually found that the organdy needs a smaller amount folded over, only about 4 or 5 mm.

Icky wrinkles :(

Here's how the machine hemmed organdy ruffle looks compared to a hand hemmed one. Thicker, but not bad!

Machine on the left, hand on the right.

The length of the ruffle will depend on how long the edge you're sewing it to is, and how gathered you want it to be.

I recommend making a sample with various lengths of ruffle, so you can see how they look. And so you can use up all your wonky practice hems!

I made this sample with ruffles gathered down 1.5x, 2x, 2.5x, and 3x, and it's a very useful reference to have on my wall.

I tapered them so I could also have a reference for different widths.

For wrist ruffles you will need to cut each of the wristbands as 2 pieces instead of 1. 

I'm not pulling threads here because this sample is a fairly stiff cotton, and have drawn on the stitching lines so you can see that the finished wristband will be 1.5 cm, and I've left only a 5 mm seam allowance on each of the long sides.

The ruffle I cut 3x the length of the finished wristband, because wrist ruffles are typically quite full. Holding the ruffle up against the piece is a perfectly fine way to measure this, and then you can use that ruffle to measure a second one of the same size.

I carefully machine hemmed the ends of this, the same way I did the narrow hems on the rest of the shirt, but depending on the material it might be easier to hem them by hand. Leave a long thread tail and don't backstitch, so you can tie them off.

Run the usual 2 lines of gathering stitches along the raw edge of the ruffle, going a bit closer to the edge than before, since the inside of the wristband is going to be rather crowded.

Fold and mark the quarters on both the ruffle and one wristband piece, excluding the wristband seam allowances in the quartering. Then pull on the gathering thread and match up the quarters, pining everything in place just like the end of the sleeve on the plain wristband.

I do my usual initial line of long stitches to reduce the chances of hitting a pin, but much like the armhole binding, I don't need to sew this seam twice because that'll happen when the second half of the wristband is added.

Sew the second half on with a normal, short stitch, so that thr ruffle is sandwiched in between the two halves.

It should look like this.

Press it so the ruffle is sticking out one way and the 2 wristband halves are the opposite way, and then gather and quarter the end of the sleeve.

This gets sewn on the same was as the wristband on the plain shirt.

Gathered and pinned, sewn over with long stitches, pins removed, sewn again with short stitches. (You can sew it just once with short stitches if you want to, I just don't like doing it with so many pins.)

Here you could understitch if you want, but with such a tiny wristband it's probably not necessary.

You can finish the inside of the wristband by hand like I did in part 2, but if you want to do it all by machine, you can! (And it works the same way for collars.)

For that, when you fold in the long edge, make sure it's a little bit past the wrist seam.

Sew the ends right sides together as usual, and turn and press.

I clipped this much off the seam allowances, since there's so much seam allowance inside this wristband.

Make sure the edge is protruding about 2 mm past the seam all the way along. Press it and pin (or baste) it in place.

Then topstitch right along that edge, close as you can get to it without going in the seam. (There is a version where you stitch in the ditch - the pants waistbands I alter at work are done that way - but I don't recommend it for anything where there are gathers. It could squash them and make them sadder looking.)

The topstitching should have caught the edge of the underside of the wristband.

Finished wristband from the outside.

Finished wristband from the inside.

I never do it that way because I like the hand finished ones better, but the shirts and collars of modern button ups are done that way. 

(Actually, they're mostly done without the first line of sewing, the topstitching is usually the only thing holding them on. At least with the shirt cuffs I alter at work.)

For a 100% machine sewn wristband, I think this is pretty good!

To machine sew ruffles onto the front, you will need to leave the slit closed after cutting out. Mark a line as long as you want the slit to be (I did 30 cm) but don't cut it yet.

Then cut a facing for it. I made this one 4 cm longer than my marked line, and 5 cm wide, though you could go narrower. (And the narrower the better, if you don't want it to be too obviously machine sewn.)

Now you'll need a strip of ruffle material twice as wide as you want the finished ruffles to be, plus hem allowance and seam allowance for the middle. I cut this one 14.5 cm wide, and my finished ruffles are about 6.5 cm.

Hem both edges, making sure both hems are on the same side, and cut your ruffle down to the length you want. Bosom ruffles tend to be less gathered than wrist ones, so I'm only doing 2x the length here.

On the body, mark a line 1 cm down from the top to account for the seam allowance that will end up in the collar, and another 1 cm up from the bottom.

Hem the ends just as before.

Now it needs to be gathered down. For the singular gathered seam we needed 2 lines of gathering stitches, and since this one is 2 gathered seams right next to each other, we need 3.

Mark a line down the middle, and another line on each side of that line, about 1 cm away.

Run gathering stitches along all 3 lines. (If you're using 2 strips of lace you might try slightly overlapping the edges, machine basting them together, and using that as your middle row of gathering.)

The ruffle and the portion of the body with the marked line should have the quarters marked on them, just like everything else.

Then you can gather up the ruffle and pin it down, making sure to leave that 1 cm gap at either end. This should be on the outside of your shirt.

I then machine baste over top of all those lines of gathering, so I can remove the pins before adding the facing.

Draw a line down the middle of your facing, same length as the line on the body, and then a stitching line on either side of it. I did mine about 5 mm away.

And a little curve on the bottom is helpful too.

Then pin it on top and sew a very long U shape along those outer lines.

Top edge of the facing goes all the way to the top edge of the body.

Cut it open along the middle line. 

Carefully clip the little U at the bottom, so it turns smoothly.

Remove the basting holding the outer 2 rows of gathering down, and the gathering threads, and press the facing to the inside. You can leave it square if you prefer, but I think it looks much nicer if you cut it to a point.

Press all the edges in on the facing and topstitch them down.

Here, again, you could do some understitching. Probably not necessary unless your fabric is shifty and slinky though.

I would have basted this if I were using linen, but on this cotton pinning worked just fine.

I still strongly recommend doing the usual bar tack.

It's not as inconspicuous as the wrist ruffle, since the facing makes the machine work more obvious, but it still looks nice!

Intro, Video, & Hand Sewing Links 

Tutorial part 1 - Pattern & Cutting 

Tutorial part 2 - Construction 

Tutorial part 3 - Ruffles - You are here!