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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:
- My
~/.units file currently contains definitions for beardseconds, bananas and the more conventional Nm and NeL (linear mass density of fibres).↩︎ - yeah, right. when.↩︎
blog.trueelena.org/blog/2025/0…
Masked Lilith
in reply to Masked Lilith • • •Camera Support
I'll post about bigger downsides first. Currently, camera support is lacking. An app called megapixels worked back on the previous version of Mobian (Bookworm), but GTK4 dropped support for OpenGLES 2.0 and some apps, like megapixels, depend on being able to utilize OpenGL. You can patch GTK4 to add support back in, but that's just a bandage for now. You might be able to get it working with millipixels or Gnome Snapshot, but I have not had success with them yet.
Megapixels: gitlab.com/postmarketOS/megapi…
Millipixels: source.puri.sm/Librem5/millipi…
Gnome Snapshot: apps.gnome.org/Snapshot/
If you want a PinePhone and want to use the camera, sticking to Mobian Bookworm or looking to see what PostmarketOS are doing are probably your best options for now.
PostmarketOS: postmarketos.org/
That said, when I was running Mobian Bookworm, it could actually take some decent pictures, assuming the lighting was usable. It's by no means what you could get out of a Google Pixel, but it was fine for most situations. There was no decent way to record video with it, though, nor did it work for video calls.
Camera – Apps for GNOME
apps.gnome.orgMasked Lilith
in reply to Masked Lilith • • •Connectivity
I'm not using cellular service with it at all currently. Back when I did use T-Mobile with it, it was unreliable. However, that was back at the end of Buster and early months of Bookworm, so that might have changed significantly. I currently just use public wifi on the go.
On the wifi front, it has been solid for only supporting 2.4GHz. There were some issues with WPA3 and moving between connections, but Trixie brought fixes that resolved those.
Bluetooth on it works well. Though, if it's actively using bluetooth for something more intensive (like audio) and wifi, then I recommend keeping it to the SBC codec instead of SBC-XQ. It starts having connectivity issues if both of them are actively being used.
Elena ``of Valhalla''
in reply to Masked Lilith • •@Masked Witch /me waves the secret pinephone daily driver¹ salute :D
I'm using cellular service rather than wifi more than half of the time, and I feel that these days it's way more reliable than it used to be: lately the main reason why I didn't have data service has been because I had not paid for it (ehm... :D ), or disabled international roaming because I live close to a border and then traveled internationally (double ehm...)
to be fair, I never use it for phone calls, only data, so I don't know whether receiving calls is reliable
(and I suspend a lot, because battery and not wanting notifications anyway)
¹ for values of “daily” where I don't use a phone every day
Masked Lilith
in reply to Elena ``of Valhalla'' • • •sleepwalkneo
Codeberg.orgElena ``of Valhalla'' likes this.