Tudor Shirt progress

There has been sewing! Alas, a tudor shirt at this stage of construction doesn't look like much, especially considering I forgot to turn it right way round before taking any pictures *ahem*

So to make sense of it all, so far the sleeves have been attached to the body of the shirt, complete with underarm gussets. I've been hand sewing this, backstitch for the seams and then flat felled using this nifty tutorial. I admit, the tutorial confused me a little the first time I tried it, but on the second sleeve I sailed through.

The other thing I discovered while making this shirt is that cotton thread is... rather annoying to work with. It knots at the slightest opportunity, and when working with something as delicate as cotton voile, you can't afford to be too rough. So I came up with the idea of tensioning the fabric while I sewed. This started out as stretching the section I was sewing over my first finger fingernail, but this was giving me quite a small area to work on, so I obtained a piece of leathr from a friend, and supporting this over that same finger, I had myself a much larger sewing area.

It worked *beautifully*. I had been concerned that it would be unwieldy, would be to unbalanced or just plain wouldn't work at all, but it worked so well I had all of the straight seams done in very short order! This little offcut is shortly going to become a staple of my sewing box. 

And so I finish off my post with a picture of the extremely rare, Well Behaved Sewing Supplies Support Suzie.