Reworking another old shift

 In the end of January there is the traditional guild feast with our 16th century guild, and this time I want my fiancé to join us, so he needs something to wear. I have started on a shift for him, which also gives me a chance to try out some new techniques.

Back in 2018 I did a very simple shift.

Me wearing the shift in Visby

It had loose open sleeves, and the neck was just gathered into a collar band, no smocking of anything fancy like that. I have used it quite a lot, and then in 2020 I faked it into a fancy shift by removing the collar and replacing it with a bought gold ribbon instead. The plan had always been to refashion it into something better, and now when David needed a shift I decided to start from the old shift.

The shift was a female length shift, so I cut off around 20 cm from the bottom, and then I lengthened the sleeves instead with the fabric that I had cut off.

Trying out the shorter lenght and longer sleeves on David

Then it was all about preparing smocking at the cuffs and neck

The finished cuff, with the visible seam
where I added the cut off bottom of the shift.

For smocking I decided to do stemstitches on top of the pleats, which can be seen in portraits from the period. I have also read a discussion on how whether the honeycomb smocking that is seen everywhere today is more of a reenactment fashion than what was actually used. Using this also makes it nice to work with white linen thread, which is a look that I have always preferred instead of blackwork. The cuff is closed with two pieces of fingerbraided strings. Now it's on to the other cuff and the neckline.