Dressing Girls Sew-Along: Planning

Good planning makes for far less craziness in life, and I’m very fond of a quiet, pleasant time, personally. Here’s a quick look at some of the planning that’s going into my own process of re-dressing two little girls for our living history interpretive season.

Plan For Real Life To Continue

If the head sewist falls into a Black Hole of Making, everyone gets crabby, filthy, starving, and naked. This is not conducive to positive family relations. So we make some plans that allow real life to continue! This includes some grocery shopping for foods that many members of the family can prepare, pre-cooking or batch-cooking some dishes, crock-pot meals, etc. I also plan to take work breaks and do things like push laundry. And, before sitting down to sew, I do make sure I’m dressed, and the house is reasonably tidy. It sounds odd, but I’m a lot more productive and no one hates me. So, it works!

Plan for Realistic Work Segments

If a 48- or 72-hour Black Hole of Making is not realistic for your household, then plan something else. This sew-along is broken down into 20-minute working segments. If you can do three of those in a day, wonderful! If you can only do one of those, great! You’ll still make progress, and can get quite a lot done over time!

Plan for Efficient Time Use

I know that it takes only about five minutes more to cut an extra chemise or pair of drawers, as to cut one. So, planning my work to allow enough time to cut multiples, or do just one step on multiple garments at once, allows me to use my time efficiently.

In my case, I know we’ll be volunteering 1-3 days a week. I would prefer to do only one or two big loads of washing and pressing, so planning for each girl to have two chemises, two drawers, and a full complement of 1850s petticoats, plus one or two dresses, a sunbonnet, and two or three pinafores and aprons, will let me accomplish my interpretive and laundry goals, without overrunning my realistic and efficient sewing time allotment.

It makes sense, then, to cut all four chemises in one go, and “railroad” the work, completing each step on all four garments in one session, as often as possible. My hands will work more efficiently, and the work speeds right along!

Planning for efficient time use also includes making sure I write up a measurement card for each girl, and keep them in my sewing box for easy reference. This saves me a lot of hollering, since this time of year, they’re more likely to be found out with the chickens in the coop, or up a tree, than inside our little cottage.

I am making sure to have a plentiful stock of the supplies I’ll need: a fresh packet of machine needles (the cheapest and best investment you can make in a sewing project!), a few spools of nice white 100% cotton thread, a fresh beeswax, sharp scissors, several thimbles, and the white china buttons I’ll use, all handy to my sewing space. I work at our kitchen table, so everything gets tucked into a cloth tote bag between work sessions. It’s compact, portable, and keeps everything together for easy start-up at each sewing session.

Plan for Thrift

Though my local chain stores don’t tend to have a lot of usable historic fabric, there is one grade of “premium muslin” that works very nicely as period “long cloth” for undergarments, so I planned ahead and purchased ten yards of it with a 50% off coupon, for a total expenditure of $35.

I’m also hauling out the miscellaneous pile of current petticoats, giving them all a good soak in oxygenated bleach (Oxi-clean is my drug of choice), and a nice long line-dry in the sunshine to brighten the fabric. Then we’ll evaluate them: most will need waists reset, tucks and hems adjusted, etc, but I can re-make and re-use my previous labor, saving my new fabric as much as possible. This is only realistic because the previous items were made with good period fabrics and techniques. Those initial investments pay off!

Another thrift measure is tailoring undergarments to the needs of the individual child. My current 8yo is very slender; chemises made on a full-width of 45″ would drown her tiny frame! Instead, I’ll be cutting her chemise fronts and backs on only 30″ of fabric, and using the remaining 15″ of width to cut bands, sleeves, and frills. Scraps will be used as pieced linings in bodices, too. My goal is to have only the merest scraps of white cotton left!

Plan for Style

My base pattern for the girls’ things is our SA-200 Girls Linens pattern. However, my girls have different stylistic preferences, and we’re also targeting an early-middle 1850s look for our interpretive work this year. So I’ll be modifying the base pieces from the patterns, using different trim options, and otherwise customizing the look to suit both our living history needs, and each girl’s personal style. It’s grand to be able to have a unique look that’s still 100% under the umbrella of Period, Everyday, and Common for the era!

It looks like the fabric is ready to pull off the line and give a quick press… and then it’s on to dressing my girls!