A Pair of Undersleeves

Just because I love handsewing, I chose to make a pair of undersleeves. Do I need a pair of undersleeves? Absolutely not! One day, maybe. Maybe I just wanted an excuse to procrastinate on my corset. It was a nice little project. If you're confused about what kind of undersleeves I'm talking about, here are a couple pictures. They would have been work with any type of sleeves that were open, and possibly shorter.

I pulled out leftover fabric from my dotted swiss dress. I thought I only had maybe a yard and a half. Man, it was more like 3! I've got a lot to work with. It's going to be like the dotted swiss that never dies. I love working with it, though; it irons really nicely, and just feels like a good quality. Just to recap, I bought it at Hancocks. The below originals are kind of textured, but not exactly dotted swiss.

All in all, they took about 4 hours of handsewing, or, in other words, 4 episodes of P+P. It cracks me up how much my sister loves that show.

From what I've seen, there are several different ways to do undersleeves. They can be completely detached, with either a drawstring or elastic at the top (yes, elastic!), or made longer and basted to the armscye of the dress itself. The undersleeve that doesn't attach is best worn with dresses whose sleeves are more tailored (as in the 1860s), vs. some of the 1850's open pagoda sleeves were occassionally slashed up very high, in which case a detached sleeve could potentially be too short.

Bonus: I had all the supplies already. Technically, I could have entered this into the Heirlooms and Heritage challenge, because I used buttons from my Great Great Grandma's stash (the same excuse as my lame drawers), but I chose not to. Hopefully, the mother-of-pearl doesn't look to dingy against the bright white fabric.

This may need to go into my pile of to-do tutorials, if I can revise it to basic squares.