Free-Hand Nightgown

 Hello Readers,

I made a nightgown recently that I thought I'd share with you. It is a very simply, but comfy design that is easily made without a storebought pattern. 

We were gifted with some Lanz flannel years ago, and I finally got around to doing something with it.

This is the basic idea of the layout I did on my fabric. I didn't measure how many yards of fabric I used (!) but I'm guessing it was 2 yards. I had to really squeeze the neckline facing out of some scraps, and it is not a nice, finished facing by any means, so I would suggest using another piece of fabric for facings if you're dealing with only 2 yards of fabric. I held the fabric up to myself to get the neckline and shoulder in the right places for the yoke and cut it out. If you'd like more in-depth instructions on this, here's a blog post that has a yoke tutorial in it.

{unfolded skirt}

Then I loosely stitched two rows of gathering across the top of skirt. On the front skirt, I clustered gathers on each side as shown below:

On the back skirt, I did roughly even gathers all the way across. I attached the skirts to the yolk front and back. 

I sewed up the side seams of my skirts to the corners. I don't remember the exact order I sewed the rest of the nightgown in, but I can tell you the steps :) 

I hemmed the skirt and set the sleeves in, and hemmed them as well. If you'd like to see how to set-in a sleeve you can find a tutorial in this post. I made a pleat in the top of each sleeve because I had extra material.

I put the neckline facing in and tried the gown on, only to realize...

The back of the skirt looked rather ridiculous. It just had way too much yardage in it! The front of the skirt had managed pretty well, but not the other side. So I took in two vertical tucks on either side of the back skirt, just below the yoke. They were ~6-7" long and were effective in gathering up some yardage. However, the look was not professional and next time, I would probably just cut a narrower skirt for the back! 

Well, you learn something new every time. I really like this nightgown and it whipped together in one evening. If you try something of the sort let me know!

to God be the glory,

                                                                   Miss Humphrey