Madame Vastra: Part 2: The Shirt

I'm making progress on Madame Vastra. The shirt is now finished. I used white poly-linen for the body of the shirt, and a mixture of other fabrics for all the embellishments on Vastra's shirt. 

Madame Vastra's shirt seems to be a blouse with bishop sleeves, no gathers at the should/arm scye, and a lot of embellishments, such as the embroidered collar and applique/colourful material on the sleeve.

 The first step was to cut out the shirt. I was very lazy and didn't use a pattern. The body of the shirt is a rectangle, and the sleeves are a mix of triangles and rectangles. I actually made the sleeves bigger by adding triangles.  Next I sewed on the red patches on the shoulders. These are just rectangles of interfaced satin that were left over from a project. I turned the raw edges under and sewed them down.

 The next step was to sew on the decoration on the sleeves. It's difficult to see the exact pattern on Vastra's sleeve, but it looks something like this. I used a piece of pillowcase for the base, then sewed down bias tape to make stripes. I coloured the cloth with fabric markers to get the right colour, then added white spots with white acrylic. When everything was dry, I sewed it down.

 Here's what the shirt looked like spread out. I tried a new method, with was to sew the sleeve to the shoulder first, then to sew everything together.

 Time to gather the sleeves. This was tricky because the fabric kept unravelling. I just sewed a band of cloth around the end of the sleeve, turned it over, and sewed it down by hand.

 Still not finished but it already looks so pretty.

Next step: finishing the collar. This was just a piece of bias tape sewn around the collar. It was a bit difficult because I had to sew multiple pieces of bias tape together. 

And last, the embroidery round the collar. Luckily it was a really simple pattern, and I just backstitched it with some thick red thread.