The new shift is done

I finished the new shift in time for the Sten Stures ben celebrations, and I wore it under my green gown. I was actually worried that it would be too much fabric under the gown, especially in the sleeves that are fairly tight, but it worked out fine. It's definitely more coarse than my fine, white shifts, which was felt since it was pressed on the skin.

I decided to do continue with pattern darning on the sleeve cuffs, but this time I winged it a bit more. Even if I felt it was sloppier, and the base pleats a lot more uneven, I'm much happier with the cuffs than the neck edge.

The straight lines are stem stitch and then the chain is made with pattern darning. This is not a pattern from a specific pattern book or painting so I can't say how historically accurate it is. Small geometric patterns were popular though, at least I can say that. When I made the cuffs I tried them around my wrist and felt they were too big, so I tigthened them some more. Of course they ended up just on the small side. I had already planned to use a fabric button to close the cuffs, since I wanted it to be easy to close by myself. A button and button loop gives some extra width, so in the end that was the obvious choice.

The button was made after this tutorial, but the measurement of the base circle is more like 3,5 cm in diameter rather than 5 as in the tutorial. I was thinking about doing threadcovered butons, but when I started doing the covering in black thread I realised that I couldn't see the black thread on the black fabric. I wanted the button to be black, rather than changing the colour of the covering thread, so I kept the buttons as simple fabric buttons For the button loop I used this tutorial.