40s french knickers

Hello everybody,

Thanks for visiting, in todays post I am gonna show the process of making so callled french knickers, popular in the 1940s.
Mine are made from a pink cotton, some cotton trimming and closes with buttons and handsewn buttonholes.

As always I started with the research and came across this patterns, as underwear was often home made back then. 

So my research showed that the patten differs extremly from modern made shorts, the have this litte piece inserted where the crotch seam is supposed to start.

So I started out with a regular shorts aka pants pattern and dried to draft them this way, made a mock-uo and redrawn the pattern. With this one I cut the pieces from the cotton, which looked like this

Then the first thing I was going to sew was the crotch seam, I pressed it to one side and overstitched 1 mm away  from the edge.

I made this two times then I have sewn the two parts togehter at the side. Note: 1 cm away from the edge, which will later be attached to the main part is left open, so you can easily sew this later on. 

Then one side of the crotch piece gets sewn to the outside of the knickers, which is tricky because its pointy. I made little cut in the fabric where the middle of the point is with a depth of 1 cm.

This turned out more complicted than intened so on the other side is just made the cut into the crotch piece, and cut the other side when I reached there with the seam. Then i sewed the other side. 

After that I overstitched all the seams i just made for more stability, again with 1 mm away from the seam. 

Then i stitched up the side seams, but made sure that I leave open a few cm on the botton to form a slit. On the left side I additonally left the part, where the fly for the closure goes, open.

 This fly as cut on both sides but was trimmed away on the right side, since i just need one closure. Obviously I could have made two for design purposes, but considering the time period, people made sure to save material where they could.

The seams got finished by felling them in place with a slip stitch, it's barely visible from the outside, and is one of the suggested methods used in one of my tailoring books ( published in 1961 but i suppose home sewing hasn't changed that much in 15 years.)

Then I made the facing, the lower edge was sewn inward by half a cm and then pressed as suggested in this book: https://archive.org/details/hallsimplifiedhomesewing1943/page/n7

The facing was sewn on the edge with one 1cm seam allowance, as I cut it. All the away around, also on the bottom edge of the fly. ( I made a cut where the fly starts beforehand, and felled the seam just to the cut)

I trimmed the seam allowance way to about the half of it and gut the edges of the fly away, but it depends on your fabric and how much it frays. The seam allowance gets pressed open and flipped over to the other side, where the lower edge is stitched down with slip stiches again.

Then I hemmed the shorts, by turning it inward and felling it down again by hand. Then I gave it another good press. 

The inner part of the crotch piece was still unsewn, which I made now, I basically just turned it inward and felled it down so the stitching of the outer part is hidden. 

And I forgot to take pictures of both...obviousy...

But the next thing I made was securing the fly and the slits just with multiple stiches at the same spot. contrasting in this case. 

The hem got decorated with some trimming I also used on the matching bra, it was stitched on by machine close to the edge, the ends were tucked in when i reached there. 

Lastly I made the closure, which meant buttons. The buttonholes are handsewn as I would hae been in that time. I quickly stitched on a fabric scrap, where the holes were placed, since it was number one rule in my tailoring book, to always! have two layers of fabric, when making buttonholes. And one can't argue with their grandmothers, right?

And that's it, the knickers are done, sadly I don't have pictures from the making of the bra but here is a picture of that too. 

Now that the undergarments are finished I can move on to the actual dress and apron. 

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