One of the many things I wanted to make for the SCA was a full outfit based on the portraits by Lucas Cranach. In these 16th century paintings, like the one of Emilie of Saxony to the right, the woman often has a dress that is low cut in both the front and back, and occasionally has billowy sleeves puffing out from beneath the main dress. As such, it can be elucidated that she might be wearing a white linen underdress with voluminous sleeves, and a deep neckline. A shirt like this would be a versatile piece to have. Unfortunately, there is a very limited supply of extant garments from this time period, and I do not know of an example of something that would work for this exact style.

For construction, all seams were about 1/8^th of an inch, to match the standard 1/8^th to 1/16^th of an inch most often encountered in historical garments (Arnold 65+). They were done in a run and fell method appropriate for the time, with the bottom hem of the shirt being done with a double fold that was whipstitched (I fully admit some of the seams did end up a little bigger than intended. Medical issues with hands acting up can be annoying that way...).

For the chemise, I first sewed the top maybe 4" of the 4 main pieces together (the front, back, and sleeve). Once the tops of the rectangles were assembled, it was a tube with a ~180” circumference. This tube was then marked out with several rows of dots at half inch increments using a manila file template in order to be a guide for pleating the material... or at least that's what I did at the start. I quickly got annoyed, and since I have made many pleats at this point, I switched over to just pleating by eye. It still came out quite uniform and even looking. This half inch pleat size was chosen since it is very close to a size used in extant pleatwork. In the Lengberg finds, pleats averaged 1.4cm, or 0.55” (Nutz, p84). This number was simplified slightly, which made it easier to mark out using the rulers on hand. The fabric was gathered at the neckline down to a tiny size, to help set the pleats. I then left this overnight. The next day, I loosened things up a bit, and draped the neckline over myself. I found that I liked a neckline of around 46", so that is what I chose.

I bound the neckline according to the article “How to Pleat a Shirt in the 15^th Century” by Beatrice Nutz. The same was later done for the sleeves, with an 8 inch binding. In the article, it is stated that "the trimming strip is equally broad on both sides, first one edge is folded in, and then sewn onto the pleats with a running stitch, the fold fastened with whip stitches, then folded over the edge of the pleats and the border then folded in once more and sewn to onto the other side of the pleats again with whip stitches". I made sure to sew through every pleat with my whip stitches. The final results look rather good, though I did unfortunately "fold" some of the pleats in the wrong direction during the monatomous process. No one will likely be able to tell besides me.

Once the neckline was done, I figured out how deep the gussets needed to be set (5" down from the neckline), then sewed in the gussets, sewed down the sides and sleeves, and hemmed the shirt. As previously mentioned, I then bound the sleeves down to 8" in the same way I did the neckline.

Overall, I am quite happy with how the chemise turned out. It falls to about mid calf, which works perfectly fine. The sleeve are poofy, and work well under several of the outfits I have made that require a sleeve to blouse out. Luckily I have had plenty of experience with tiny seams and pleating by this point in time, so this actually wasn't as time consuming as I expected it to be. And, now I have a fully hand sewn, period appropriate chemise I can wear with my German outfits (and realistically Italian if I decide to go there someday...)