Video Notes:

In this video, I show you how I made a recreation of the shirt worn by Tiuri in The Letter For the King.

IG: barrowsandwights
https://ko-fi.com/barrowsandwights

 

Notes:
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Materials:
– 4 yards thin cotton fabric, $20 ebay, overdyed with indigo dye
– thread
– 1 button for the collar
– 2 pairs of snaps for the wrists
– sewing machine
– scissors
– ruler
– Frixion pen with heat erasable ink

Construction:
– Body pieces are rectangles cut to my meaurements with a very wide neck for gathering
– Sleeves are trapezoid pieces cut to my arm measurements plus seam allowance and width for ease
– Collar band is a 2″ bias strip from the scrap after cutting out the sleeve pieces
– All raw edges are zig-zagged on the sewing machine to prevent fraying

Reveal Outfit:
– Finished Object: Tiuri’s shirt
– green cotton pirate pants tied at the waist and ankles, later inserted yellow pockets
– brown leather Medieval shoes

 

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Attributions:
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Title Card:
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Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

Logo designed and drawn by A.R. Gergler

Background Music:
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Wintersong – Melodic Celtic Fantasy by Alexander Nakarada
Link: https://filmmusic.io/song/5722-wintersong—melodic-celtic-fantasy
License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

Music: The Road Home [2023] by Alexander Nakarada
Free download: https://filmmusic.io/song/10745-the-road-home-2023
Licensed under CC BY 4.0: https://filmmusic.io/standard-license

 

End Screen:
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Photo by Anton Atanasov
https://www.pexels.com/photo/landscape-photo-of-forest-1655901/

 

Transcript:

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[Music: Upbeat medieval string music]

Hi. I’m Adrian. Welcome to Barrows & Wights.

The Letter for the King is a short fantasy TV series based on a book by the same name. In this show, our main character Tiuri is tasked by a fallen knight with bringing a letter to the King to warn him of the Big Bad’s invading army. Hapless hero, coming of age, swords and sorcery – it’s a good time.

Tiuri’s jacket worn throughout the majority of the show is a future dream project of mine, but today I’m showing you how I recreated Tiuri’s comfortable and simple shirt.

Glimpses of this shirt can be seen throughout the show, but I worked off of screenshots from Episode 3: At the End of the World.

I first sketched out the basic details of the shirt. This show is set in a psuedo-Medieval fantasy setting, so I went for a basic rectangular shirt pattern with long sleeves. Tiuri’s shirt has gathering in the front and back at the neckline. The collar is a simple band fastened at the front of the neck with either a small button or a hook and eye situation. It’s hard to see that level of detail in the screenshots I took. Tiuri’s shirt has dropped shoulder seams, indicating that there’s no sleeve cap or armhole shaping. There are no cuffs at the end of the sleeve. The shirt has a split hem at the bottom with a longer piece in the back than the front.

I then sketched out the basic shapes of each of the shirt pieces: a bias strip for the collar band, two trapezoidal pieces for the sleeves, and two rectangles with a scoop at the top to gather the neckline for the body pieces. I made up this little test swatch for how I thought the neckline gathers should work and it turned out how I wanted, so I didn’t have to do much troubleshooting.

I made this shirt out of a thin, lightweight semi-sheer cotton that I bought used from a seller on ebay for about $20 US. The original color of this cotton was a bright yellow. In my Dyeing Green video, I overdyed this yellow fabric with indigo dye to make it mostly blue with a sort of a subtle green undertone.

I had divided this fabric into four one-yard sections for dyeing, so I decided to allocate three of these sections to the big front and back pieces and cut the remaining parts of this shirt out of the fourth section.

I measured my arm at the bicep, plus a couple of inches for ease, for the widest part of the sleeve at the top and drew that line on my fabric with heat erasable ink. I then took an approximate measurement from my shoulder to my wrist for the length of the sleeve and drew a line lengthwise at this measurement down the center of the sleeve. I measured my wrist for the bottom, narrower part of the sleeve and drew that line across where my length measurement ended. I ended up with a shape that looks like this: [ding!]

The rest of this panel was set aside for later.

I prepared my front and back pieces by tearing each one-yard piece of fabric in half length-wise. A single one yard piece was not wide enough for the gathering at the neck and I didn’t want there to be a single seam somewhere around one shoulder on the final garment. Splitting all the pieces meant that I would be creating two symmetrical seams that look more intentional. I pinned three panels together for the front and three panels together for the back. I sewed these panels together with a french seam.

I have a template for a tunic neck opening that I drafted after I completed the undershirt for my Medieval project. I didn’t like how wide that neckline turned out, so I tested a few corrections on scrap fabric until I reached a shape that I liked. This fabric template is marked at the center front, center back, and the shoulder seams, so I can match those points to a garment.

I used this template to draw the curved sides of the neck openings for the front and the back. I measured the estimated length for the shoulder seam from the end of the piece and traced the neck curve template on that point, stopping at the lowest point of the curve. I then did the same thing for the other side and connected those low points with a long straight line. The gathers on Tiuri’s shirt are concentrated at the center front and back, so no gathering will the done on the curved edge of the neckline that sits over the shoulders.

Once those shapes for the neck were cut out, I secured all the raw edges with a zigzag stitch to prevent fraying.

While the front piece was still flat, I cut a slit for the center front neck opening and bound that edge with a bit of scrap from cutting out the neck. To be honest, I was just kind of winging it based on the vague memory of a gif I saw on Pinterest ages ago.

Once that was done, I matched up the shoulder seams and sewed those together with a ½” seam allowance. This is the seam allowance that I used throughout this project unless otherwise specified.

Then came the gathering. Because this fabric is so thin, I can fit a lot of gathering into the neckline and I didn’t feel like hand-basting those gathering threads into the garment. I used a long stitch on my sewing machine along the part of the neck that I wanted to gather and carefully gathered the neck using those threads.

I retrieved that leftover piece from where I cut out my sleeves and cut a long strip on the bias to use for the neck edge binding. I pinned it to the outside of the neckline, sewed it down, then pressed and turned it in to the inside of the garment. I made sure that the interior fold of the bias binding was longer than my original stitching line so that I could stitch-in-the-ditch along the front of the shirt to secure that down. On the actual costume, you can see that the neck edge binding has a visible stitching line on the neck binding, but I don’t really like how this looks and opted to use this method instead.

At this point, I remembered that I needed to fasten the neck of this shirt somehow, so I went to my button stash to find a button that I thought would work. While I was in there, I grabbed a couple of snaps to use on the ends of the sleeves. I cut a little strip, folded the edges to the middle, and then folded it in half to make the loop for the button fastening. I can sometimes get away with making a little strip like this with a sewing machine, but this fabric was so thin that it kept getting pushed down through the gap in the bobbin plate. I ended up whip-stitching the outer folded ends together by hand.

I sewed the button down to one neck edge and sewed down the loop to the other.

With the main body piece lying flat, I matched the top center point of each sleeve to the shoulder seams and sewed them together. Then, I could sew the sleeves together from wrist to shoulder and the side seams all in one go, leaving a gap at the wrist to allow for rolled sleeves and stopping at a point past my hips for the split hem.

At this point, I tried on my shirt and marked with pins where I wanted the front and back hems to fall. I marked these points and removed the excess fabric. This fabric is very easy to rip along the grain lines, so I just did that instead of drawing them out and cutting them, just clipping the fabric as needed to get past any stitching.

I pressed back the seam allowance at the wrist to finish off the gap and did the same for the gap at the split hem. I sewed these down with about a ¼” seam allowance. Then, I pressed and pinned up the hem of the shirt and sewed that down.

The last thing to do was to hand sew the snaps on at the wrist. I find these to the best invisible fastenings for costume recreations.

I found this whole process from start to finish to be pretty quick and relatively painless, even though I was really just doing whatever I felt like in the moment. The finished shirt is super comfortable and turned out pretty much spot on to what I was aiming for. I’ve worn it with pirate pants, jeans, and occasionally just by itself to sleep in.

[Music: Dramatic fantasy orchestral music]