Posted on September 3, 2025
Tags: madeof:bits

For quite some time, I have been thinking about trying a bit of patchwork, and English Paper Piecing looked like a technique suited to my tastes, with the handsewing involved and the fact of having a paper pattern of sort and everything.

The problem is, most of the scraps of fabric I get from my sewing aren’t really suitable for quilting, with a lot of them being either too black and too thick or too white and too thin.

On the other hand, my partner wears polo shirts at work, and while I try to mend the holes that form, after a while the edges get worn, and they just are no longer suitable for the office, even with some creative mending, and they get downgraded to home wear. But then more office shirts need to be bought, and the home ones accumulate, and there is only so much room for polo shirts in the house, and the worst ones end up in my creative reuse pile.

Some parts are worn out and they will end up as cabbage stuffing for things, but some are still in decent enough conditions and could be used as fabric.

But surely, for English Paper Piecing you’d need woven fabric, not knit, even if it’s the dense piqué used in polo shirts, right? Especially if it’s your first attempt at the technique, right?

Well, probably it wouldn’t work with complex shapes, but what about some 5-ish cm tall Standard Compliant bestagon? So I printed out some hexagons on thick paper, printed some bigger hexagons with sewing allowance as a cutting aid, found two shirts in the least me colours I could find (and one in grey because it was the best match for the other two) and decided to sacrifice them for the experiment.

And as long as the paper was still in the pieces, the work went nicely, so I persevered while trying to postpone the Moment of Truth.

After a while I measured things out and saw that I could squeeze a 6.5 × 7 hexagon pattern into something resembling a square that was a multiple of the 2.5 cm square on the back of my Piecepack tiles, and decided to go for another Standard for the back (because of course I wasn’t going to buy new fabric for lining the work).

I kept the paper in the pieces until both sides were ready, and used it to sew them right sides together, leaving the usual opening in the middle of one side.

Then I pressed, removed the paper, turned everything inside out, pressed again and. It worked!

The hexagons look like hexagons, the squares look like squares, the whole thing feels soft and drapey, but structurally sound. And it’s a bit lumpy, but not enough to cause issues when using it as a soft surface to put over a noisy wooden table to throw dice on.

I considered adding some lightweight batting in the middle, but there was really no need for it, and wondered about how to quilt the piece in a way that worked with the patterns on the two sides, but for something this small it wasn’t really required.

However, I decided to add a buttonhole stitch border on all edges, to close the opening I had left and to reinforce especially the small triangles on the hexagons side, as those had a smaller sewing allowance and could use it.

And of course, the 11 × 11 squares side wasn’t completely an accident, but part of A Plan.

For this project there isn’t really a pattern, but I did publish the files I used to print the paper pieceseven if they were pretty trivial.

And there are more polo shirts in that pile, and while they won’t be suitable for anything complex, maybe I could try some rhombs, or even kites and darts?

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2025/0…

Posted on August 25, 2025
Tags: madeof:atoms, craft:sewing, FreeSoftWear

A bit more than a year ago, I had been thinking about making myself a cartridge pleated skirt. For a number of reasons, one of which is the historybounding potential, I’ve been thinking pre-crinoline, so somewhere around the 1840s, and that’s a completely new era for me, which means: new underwear.

Also, the 1840s are pre-sewing machine, and I was already in a position where I had more chances to handsew than to machine sew, so I decided to embrace the slowness and sew 100% by hand, not even using the machine for straight seams.

If I remember correctly, I started with the corded petticoat, looking around the internet for instructions, and then designing my own based on the practicality of using modern wide fabric from my stash (and specifically some DITTE from costumers’ favourite source of dirty cheap cotton IKEA).

Around the same time I had also acquired a sashiko kit, and I used the Japanese technique for sewing running stitches pushing the needle with a thimble that covers the base of the middle finger, and I can confirm that for this kind of things it’s great!

I’ve since worn the petticoat a few times for casual / historyBounding / folkwearBounding reasons, during the summer, and I can confirm it’s comfortable to use; I guess that during the winter it could be nice to add a flannel layer below it.

Then I proceeded with the base layers: I had been browsing throughThe workwoman's guide and that provided plenty of examples, and I selected the basic ankle-length drawers from page 53 and the alternative shift on page 47.

As for fabric, I had (and still have) a significant lack of underwear linen in my stash, but I had plenty of cotton voile that I had not used in a while: not very historically accurate for plain underwear, but quite suitable for a wearable mockup.

Working with a 1830s source had an interesting aspect: other of the usual, mildly annoying, imperial units, it also used a lot a few obsolete units, especially nails, that my qalc, my usual calculator and converter, doesn’t support. Not a big deal, because GNU units came to the rescue, and that one knows a lot of obscure and niche units, and it’s quite easy to add those that are missing¹

Working on this project also made me freshly aware of something I had already noticed: converting instructions for machine sewing garments into instructions for hand sewing them is usually straightforward, but the reverse is not always true.

Starting from machine stitching, you can usually convert straight stitches into backstitches (or running backstitches), zigzag and overlocking into overcasting and get good results. In some cases you may want to use specialist hand stitches that don’t really have a machine equivalent, such as buttonhole stitches instead of simply overcasting the buttonhole, but that’s it.

Starting from hand stitching, instead, there are a number of techniques that could be converted to machine stitching, but involve a lot of visible topstitching that wasn’t there in the original instructions, or at times are almost impossible to do by machine, if they involve whipstitching together finished panels on seams that are subject to strong tension.

Anyway, halfway through working with the petticoat I cut both the petticoat and the drawers at the same time, for efficiency in fabric use, and then started sewing the drawers.

The book only provided measurements for one size (moderate), and my fabric was a bit too narrow to make them that size (not that I have any idea what hip circumference a person of moderate size was supposed to have), so the result is just wide enough to be comfortably worn, but I think that when I’ll make another pair I’ll try to make them a bit wider. On the other hand they are a bit too long, but I think that I’ll fix it by adding a tuck or two. Not a big deal, anyway.

The shift gave me a bit more issues: I used the recommended gusset size, and ended up with a shift that was way too wide at the top, so I had to take a box pleat in the center front and back, which changed the look and wear of the garment. I have adjusted the instructions to make gussets wider, and in the future I’ll make another shift following those.

Even with the pleat, the narrow shoulder straps are set quite far to the sides, and they tend to droop, and I suspect that this is to be expected from the way this garment is made. The fact that there are buttonholes on the shoulder straps to attach to the corset straps and prevent the issue is probably a hint that this behaviour was to be expected.

I’ve also updated the instructions so that they shoulder straps are a bit wider, to look more like the ones in the drawing from the book.

Making a corset suitable for the time period is something that I will probably do, but not in the immediate future, but even just wearing the shift under a later midbust corset with no shoulder strap helps.

I’m also not sure what the point of the bosom gores is, as they don’t really give more room to the bust where it’s needed, but to the high bust where it’s counterproductive. I also couldn’t find images of original examples made from this pattern to see if they were actually used, so in my next make I may just skip them.

On the other hand, I’m really happy with how cute the short sleeves look, and if² I’ll ever make the other cut of shift from the same book, with the front flaps, I’ll definitely use these pleated sleeves rather than the straight ones that were also used at the time.

As usual, all of the patterns have been published on my website under a Free license:

• pattern for the petticoat;
• pattern for the shift;
• pattern for the drawers.

1. My ~/.units file currently contains definitions for beardseconds, bananas and the more conventional Nm and NeL (linear mass density of fibres).↩︎
2. yeah, right. when.↩︎

blog.trueelena.org/blog/2025/0…