One of my sewing goals for 2020 was stash-busting (yeah, I started this a few months ago). Making a pair of pieced 18th century pockets was a chance to use up some smaller scraps!
I started, of course, by raiding my fabric stash. I pulled out scraps of two different printed cottons for the pieced outer layers. For the lining I pulled out my first attempt at a Regency shift, which was made out of unbleached cotton muslin.
I drafted a simple pattern from the gridded pattern in "Put On Thy Beautiful Garments: Rural New England Clothing, 1783-1800," but there are also plenty of patterns and tutorials online.
I cut out four of that pattern from the muslin. Two pieces were cut along the side seams of the old shift, one of which required a bit of extra piecing in the corner, and two were cut from the front and back. For the piecing, I used a spool of brown thread and I used a combination of light blue cotton and navy polyester thread for the quilting and construction. The little machine sewing I did used white poly thread because it was already on my machine and wasn't going to show.
Part 1: Piecing
I didn't have large enough pieces of the blue cottons to cut full pocket pieces, but I was able to get a few halves - I got two halves from the darker blue atlas-print cotton and three from the lighter blue floral cotton. I paired up one half from each fabric to get one full piece, then repeated that for a second full piece. (That was a confusing sentence to write, and I'm sure even worse to read, so check out the photo below to see what that looked like in the end.) Those two half-and-half pieces became the backs of the pockets.
I pieced together a third half of the dark blue fabric using two wider strips. That and the remaining half piece of the light blue fabric each became half of the front of one of the pockets.
Then the piecing encroached onto quilting territory.
I had decided on using 2" squares, and I grided it out on my pattern and realized I would need at least 42 squares. I cut two templates from a cereal box - a 2" square to mark sewing lines and a 2.5" square to give each piece a quarter inch seam allowance.
I got 38 squares from my scraps, with roughly twice as many dark blue squares as light blue. Which meant I was four squares short.
I decided to try triangles, which could be pieced into squares. I cut out two templates again, this time a 2" right triangle and a 3" right triangle (because seam allowance math is weird with triangles I guess). I managed to get four triangles out of each fabric, which meant four squares total, so I was set!
With everything cut out, I got to sewing. The triangles went first, pairing one triangle of each fabric into a square. Once all four of those were done, I backstitched four 'columns' of eight squares each (because that's what fit my pocket pattern height) and two 'columns' of five squares each.
Those columns, in turn, were seamed together, doing my best to match up the seam lines between squares. As I was making two separate halves, I made two pieces each consisting of two eight-square columns and one five-square column.
Once those were done, I switched my attention back to the un-pieced front halves. I used a pen to draw a seam line along the straight center edge and made a mark roughly halfway from the top to indicate where the opening will start/stop. Then I brought the heavily pieced and less pieced halves together and lined them up along the center front seam. The seams were backstitched below the marker for the opening and basted above to hold everything in place for ironing.
I ironed all the seams, paying special attention to the seam allowances of all those squares. There were empty spots on my heavily pieced halves, as I expected, but I filled those in using pieces I trimmed away from other places.
With that last bit of piecing done and ironed, I could turn my mind to other prep work.
Part 2: Preparation
I was a bit worried about how all that piecing would hold up, so I decided to 'quilt' the inner and outer layers together for strength and stability (and to use up some blue thread). I decided to use a running stitch like I did on my housewife, except the pattern was more square this time.
It was at this point that I started thinking about what I would need to actually construct the pockets. I had some 1" cotton twill tape from Burnley & Trowbridge for the waist ties, but I didn't have enough to bind the opening or edges of the pockets. So back to the stash I went. I didn't have enough bias tape either, so I decided to cut strips (not on the bias) from scraps of the white cotton fabric I had used for my Regency petticoat and to line my white Regency dress bodice. Those strips were ironed to resemble double-fold bias tape, and then I could finally put everything together!
Part 3: Construction
I carefully pinned some of my cotton strips around the pocket slits (right sides together) and machine stitched them into place. Then I stacked the front and back of each pocket wrong sides together and pinned the binding into place with the right side of the binding facing the right side of the front piece. Once those were machine sewn, I was able to fold the biding around the pocket and slit edges and whip the back side of the binding into place.
(As a side note, I had originally intended to hand sew the pockets completely. I started them in September after finishing my white Regency dress and wanted a simple little hand sewing project to work on. Piecing was a lot more work than I thought it would be and I put the project down for long periods of time. I didn't get to the actual construction until January and was just ready for the project to be done, so I gave myself permission to machine sew the binding and speed up the process a little.)
With the binding done, all I had left to do was to attach the pockets to a waist tape! I pinned the pockets to the twill tape and checked the position by tying it around my waist. One edge of the twill tape was back stitched to the back of the pocket (though the stitching went through all the layers) and the other edge was whipped to the front. As a final touch, I folded and stitched the ends of the twill tape to keep it from unraveling.
And then they were finally done!
I'm pretty happy with how they turned out, but frustrated with how long they took me to make. I'm also baffled about why I started the project in the first place - I don't do 18th century! I've only done Regency so far and I'm getting into the 1890s, and while I'd like to do some 1700s stuff, it's all pretty far down the line. They're done though, and I did some stash busting, and that's all that I really care about right now.
Stay warm. Stay safe. Stay healthy.
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