Starting an apron dress

Today, unless I go help to take care of Lady Babette’s sick daughters, I am going to cut out and start sewing a new Viking apron dress, or smokkr.

I am also going to do a bit of an alteration to the underdress I made a few months ago, to add length to the sleeves, if I can find enough matching fabric.

This apron dress is not going to be made of linen, although typically they were made either of linen or wool, with occasional trimmings of silk added.

But I found some cotton twill at the local fabric store that reminds me of a very soft wool, and I’m going to use it instead. Using the cheaper cotton instead of my good linen at this point will help me acclimatize to machine sewing after so much work by hand, without the worry of ruining my more expensive fabrics. Although sewing either by machine or by hand are quite challenging for me: they definitely do not come naturally!

Here’s the cotton twill:

Here it is next to the blue underdress that I made from some gray linen that my friend Janet VanMeter helped me to dye. This is also the dress that the sleeves need lengthening on:

And here is my first attempt at a smokkr, from green linen, which I have worn with the blue underdress:

Here I am wearing the blue and green ensemble at an event last September. It was a glorious morning!

I’ll be using the green apron dress as a partial pattern for this cotton twill one, although with some changes, which will hopefully be improvements!

Now I’d better get down to work!