Finished chemise

The 1883 chemise is finished! Today I opened the buttonhole and attached the button.

Here is the finished garment:

New Chemise

This week I wanted to sew a chemise. I have made some corsets in the past, but never a matching chemise.
So I went pattern-browsing in my sewing room and found this one:

"Chemise with Narrow Neckband", 1883
from Fashions Of The Gilded Age vol. 1

I chose this one since I wanted to have a wide neck-line and short sleeves edged with lace.

For the fabric I took a light cotton batist from my stash that I've already used for a pair of open drawers I made a couple of weeks ago.
The lace is white cotton batist, too.

The look will be slightly altered. I will have 6 rows of narrow tucks at the hem and the sleeves will be open at the side.






Usually one would start with the tucks and then sew the pieces together, but I wasn't 100% happy with the outcome on my drawers so I decided to do the sewing first and make the tucks afterwards.
That was a good idea! Look at the finished sideseam:

 

Next step was adding the sleeves and edging them with lace. I laid it in small pleats to match the round shape.










As said before, I wanted a wide neckline and so I extended the neckband by a few cm.
The picture in the book showed the neckline-lacing in one piece including the opening. I am a sewing perfectionist, so I made a "test-opening" on a separate piece of fabric using a BURDA instruction for polo- shirts. It worked well and I repeated sewing it on my chemise. 

Ta-Daa!

 

I am quite pleased with the result and even the buttonhole looks good. I found a lovely but plain mother-of-pearl button to go with it and I will fix it on sunday. My mom has a special tool to open buttonholes and since the fabric is so delicate I will be patient and not use my cutter as usual.

Here are some pictures of my (nearly) finished chemise.