Camicia (Ca-Mee Chia) or otherwise known as a Shift or Chemise.

worked on and Completed from April - June 2020

For years and years, I have loved the look of this particular extant camicia. It can be found in the Met Museum and is also described in great detail in Janet Arnold's Patterns of Fashion 4. A couple of years ago, I started working on this chemise and decided to do the embroidery by hand. I got about halfway through the first sleeve and then got sidetracked and then the sleeve I was working on disappeared in the craft room (I swear their are FAE living in that room and they occasionally like to play tricks and hide things in there from me). When I found them again, something had been spilled on them and the fabric was ruined and stained beyond repair. For the IRCC project I really wanted to do this camicia but I knew with the time constraints, I was going to have to do the main embroidery of the sleeves by machine. Luckily for me, a friend of mine had digitized the two motifs in the sleeves for machine embroidery and she willing gave me copies of the files (THANK YOU HEATHER YOU ARE A ROCKSTAR!)

So once again I started this camicia, this time armed with machine embroidery files and lovely Sulky brand thread.

My camicia was cut out based on the pattern in Janet Arnold’s Patterns of Fashion 4, item #72 on pages 55 and 112. I used 3 yards of handkerchief weight linen. The pieces were cut using the period loom width of 28 inches. All of the pieces were serged to prevent fraying while hand stitching and embroidery was planned for the entire piece. The sleeves were then grided at 3 inches both horizontally and vertically for the embroidery motifs that are on the sleeves. The motifs were embroidered using the water soluble interfacing, purple and light gold machine embroidery thread and a digitized pattern of the flower motif and pomegranate motif from the extant camicia.

The body pieces of the camicia were hemmed on all four sides and then the process of stitching it together using the purple silk thread used for embroidering the drawers and stockings was used to stitch the camicia together with an insertion stitch made up of a cretan stitch and buttonhole stitches. I completed the insertion stitches on the sleeves and gussets using the same insertion stitch that was used on the body seams.

You can find a tutorial for the cretan stitch here: https://www.embroidery.rocksea.org/stitch/cretan-stitch/cretan-stitch/

After the construction was complete, I made 1” wide bias tape from the scap linen of the camicia. This is my favorite tutorial for making bias tape: https://makeit-loveit.com/make-continouos-strip-bias-tape-binding

I then proceeded to do the running stitches for gathering the smocking on the body front, body back and both sleeve cuffs using upholstery weight sewing thread. The gathers were pulled up to make smocking pleats and the neckline and cuffs were hand stitched to the bias tape using a double whip stitch similar to what is used for cartridge pleating.

After stitching the neckline and cuffs to the smocking pleats, I added lace to the cuffs similar in style to several pictures in Patterns of Fashion 4. All of the lace was hand stitched to the camicia using a running stitch.

After adding the lace, I used the same purple silk thread and white silk thread to do smocking embroidery stitches using the outline stitch, the cable stitch, and the trellis stitch to the smocking pleats.

After the smocking embroidery was completed, two thread wrapped buttons were made for closures to the wrists and stitched onto the camicia along with two small portions of finger loop braids. The buttons are wood core beads, wrapped in white pearl cotton with the purple silk used for spines and the finger loop braids are made with the same white pearl cotton.

To finish the camicia up, a line of chain stitches was stitched in the purple silk thread along the bottom edges of the lace at the neck, wrists, and cuffs.

This particular project while it is an underlayer and will rarely bee seen by anyone not my husband or son is one that I have wanted to see come to completion for a long time. It took a lot of time and there was lots of opportunities to learn, or relearn things along the way.