Sewing with Ryan.....

This is a guest post from Ryan O'Connell at http://ryansinterp.blogspot.com/ an old friend of mine from my days in the park service. 

Hello! As a brief introduction to what I do at my own blog, I write about historical interpretation; my thoughts, it's meanings for my life, and for understanding our past publicly. One of my hobbies is Civil War Living History, commonly referred to as “reenacting”. As a Living Historian, it is generally up to me to come up with my own impression. An impression is a role I play expressed through appropriate clothing and equipment in order to tell about the time period which I am representing. Since this is generally a blog about clothing and sewing, I thought it would be appropriate to share a sewing adventure I recently had.  

Three years ago my drawers gave out. Drawers are what modern contemporary people might identify as long underwear. I will not go into details as to how they gave out, but let us just say I needed a new one. This last one was made from canton flannel, which is an appropriate time period fabric for these articles of clothing. Canton flannel is cotton flannel that is napped only on one side of the fabric, the fuzzy side in, and are very warm. I asked my wife to make me a new pair, so she got the flannel and she was going to make them for me.

Two years passed and other projects came and went.

I recently moved to Iowa with my wife, where it gets cold and I needed another layer under my clothing and she remembered to bring the canton flannel along. So, since we had a lot of time on our hands and I was interested in helping, we both set out to make me a new pair of drawers. We used Past Patterns “Middle to Late 19th Century Gentlemen's Drawers” and modified it to have draw-string waist and ankles. My wife had made a muslin version previously and she had kept all the tissue patterns from that set and applied them to the fabric and we began cutting. She told me to keep the pattern pieces in line with the grain of the fabric and mark the pattern pieces. She handled most of the tricky parts for me since I am very new to sewing. I had put buttons on before, but making a piece of clothing was daunting to me.

In putting the pieces together she showed me how to use the sewing machine to sew together the seams. As I got better on the machine she let me do longer stretches of the sewing and commented on how straight I was getting them. She was also laughed at me with how slow I was making the needle go and how super intent I was that the lines were straight. Slowly the pieces began to come together part by part and it was starting to look like a recognizable piece of clothing. When we finally put the last little bit together on the waist it was a personal accomplishment.

Then came the button holes which meant it was going to have to be all hand done. My Boy Scout training and years of working on a high ropes course helped me understand the manner of how the thread ties up upon itself before moving on to the next purl after a few practice runs on scrap clothing. The real challenge was using an off-white thread on an off-white fabric.

All in all I think I did a pretty good job. As to using modern means to make a period clothing piece, it must also be mentioned that this is underclothing so no one should really comment on the uniform spacing and low count stitching since it will be under clothing, but it is also a first attempt and underclothing will certainly hide any imperfections that there would be on them. The use of a period-appropriate fabric cut to a period pattern certainly give a feel for the past and a practical use for today.