April 2020
For the drawers, I looked at an extant pair that are housed in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and are described as "Linen drawers embroidered in silver and silver-gilt thread.” https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/83869
I started this piece by washing and prepping 2 yards of medium weight white linen. I utilized Margo Anderson’s Italian Lady’s Underpinnings Pattern as I had not made a pair of drawers previously.
This set of patterns can be found here: https://margospatterns.com/collections/italian
I cut out the fabric and then I decided to serge all of the pieces individually before I stitched the pattern together to help prevent fraying while I was working with the fabric. I stitched the construction seams together by machine and followed that with hand finishing all of the seams with flat felling the seams.
After the body of the drawers were put together, I hemmed the leg openings by hand. I pleated the body of the drawers into the waistband and closed the waistband with a whip stitch. I cut two strips of the same linen that was used to construct the drawers and serged it to keep it from fraying and then transferred an embroidery pattern from Il Burato (https://archive.org/details/ilburatolibroder00paga/page/n201/mode/2up) to the linen with a washable marker.
I used silk thread in purple and black to embroider the strips in a chain stitch. I also used some of the black silk thread to chain stitch around the opening of the drawers.
After the embroidered strips had been washed to remove the marker, ironed again, and was ready to be applied, I hand stitched the embroidered strips to the leg openings using a slip stitch at both the top and bottom edges of the strips.
I followed that up by hand stitching a purchased lace from my stash that is visually similar to punto in aria lace using a running stitch. Lastly, I put a buttonhole by machine into the waistband and stitched on a metal shank button for closure.
