Chemisettes are the “pâtisserie” of the enfantine trousseau. They’re delicate and frothy and packed full of details no right-minded person would ever attempt in miniature.
Of course, I think we all know I’m looking at right-mindedness in the rearview mirror. So I set about creating my first chemisette, filled with excitement and visions of beautiful sleeves. They would have the world’s most miniscule gathers, combed and organized into a line so neat and straight, military parade marshals would be jealous.
This was, of course, impossible. Because I had a very specific idea about how I wanted my chemisette to be constructed.
Which is to say, the correct way.
And by correct I mean, the way they did it in the good old days when infants held needles before they got teeth. (That’s probably not true but how else can you explain their super-human skills?)
Now, I know even the most hard-nosed historians find it perfectly acceptable to set doll sleeves in flat, and then stitch everything together from the wrist to the underarm through the side of the bodice in one, long seam.
I know I should be able to accept this compromise with history. And that I will never, ever be able to sew as well as babies did during the civil war. But I can’t.
I just can’t.
Somehow, even though it’s nearly impossible to imagine how Mademoiselle Béreux’s little fingers fit inside those itty bitty armscye’s and had the dexterity to set perfect little gathers in place, she did it. And if she did it, over and over again at a pace rapid enough to make money doing it, it can be done. The only question is how.
Well.
I’m here to tell you that after several days of coffee drinking and wine-soaked pouting I was not able to answer this question. But I did manage to come up with a compromise I can live with.
What I decided to try was a combination of the flat method and the set-in method. Guess what? It worked like a charm!
First I gathered up my sleeve cap and pinned it into the flat armscye. Then I stitched the sleeve to the bodice as if I were going to set the whole thing in this way. The difference is, I only stitched the gathered area. I left the underarm open.
Then I stitched the sleeve seam and the side seam of the bodice.
Once I’d done this, it was easy as anything to go in and close the underarm up from the inside.
Technically, the sleeve was not “set in”. I cheated. But without that tell-tale wrist-to-waist seam, nobody will ever know.