Choosing Your Materials
What fabric should I use?
What fabric you will use will depend on what you are making. In general your pleated garments will be made from the same materials as any other garment of that type.
For shirts and undergarments are usually made from linen, aprons are made from linen and in some cases wool.
You also need to consider who the garment will be used for and for what purpose. A peasant or laborer class would not have the same fabric available to them, as say a member of the merchant or a noble class. The finer the garment, the finer the fabric.
How much Fabric?
There is no easy way to determine how much fabric you will need for your pleated garment.
It would be wonderful to be able to say: "I want to make this style of shirt with this type of embroidery, so I will need this much fabric".
This is problematic because the amount of fabric you require is dependent on a number of factors:
- the finished dimensions of the piece
- the number of pleats you need for the design (esp. if its counted)
- the amount of fabric you have to pleat into this finished area
- the thickness of the fabric and how narrow the resulting pleats need to be
- the type of embroidery you are doing
You can estimate your fabric by calculating the fabric width before pleating vs. desired width. Next you need to determine the number of pleats you need for the design and / or the desired depth of the pleat.
For example: 45" wide starting fabric to pleat to 10", this means that you need to have about 4.5" of fabric pleat into 1" when gathered up to the fullness you desire. If in that 1" space you need to have very dense pleats to put the embroidery on, then the pleats will need to be very small, so you have more pleats per inch. A running stitch (or dots) spaced 1/4" this would give you 18 or 20 pleats/inch with the pleats being about 1/8" deep. If you are doing something with less pleating, along the lines of a honeycomb pattern then your running stitches might be an 1/2" long, giving you 8 pleats or so per inch finished with a 1/4" pleat depth. Again this is all relative to the weight of your fabric and the desired outcome.
Make samples. Before starting any project, make samples/test pieces. This way you can gauge the width, depth and density of your pleats. You will also be able to calculate how much fabric you will require. I like to do my samples up using 10" pieces of fabric. It makes the math easy and it wont take too long to pleat. Remember this process is trial and error.
Considerations
Most embroidery designations require your pleats to be fairly dense otherwise the pleats move too much when you are working on them. The denser the pleats have to be the more fabric you will need. Experiment !! Make sure your rows are sufficiently close enough together to provide a solid ground for your embroidery. For most embroidered designs you will need your pleats fairly dense otherwise the pleats when working on them. Caution: In general, you will end up requiring more fabric than you think. This can be a HUGE problem especially if you are making a shirt or undergarment that must go under other clothing. Just imagine what it would like to wear 3-4 yards of fabric under that tight doublet!!
The best example I can give is from working on one of the men's shirts. The original sleeve cuff I embroidered for th shirt had pleats of about 1/8" deep. In order to get the cuff around my wrist I needed twice the amount of fabric than I intended (I needed the full 45" width of the fabric). I tried to spread the pleats out so I needed less fabric but the design required the pleats to be fairly densely packed or it didn't look right. So you may say, this just gives you a nice full, puffy sleeve. And it did, but at the top of the sleeve, I now had 45" of fabric to put into the shirt where it was supposed to be 20". I was attempting to make a period accurate garment, so I couldn't gather the sleeve head into the shirt as that was not the construction style at the time. What I ended up doing was making two new sleeves. This time my pleats had to be a narrow as I possibly could make them, as I needed the maximum number of pleats for the width of fabric I had to work with. My resulting pleats were only about 1/16th of an inch deep. (and yes, I used the first set of sleeves for another project).
Embroidery Materials
Again, your choice of materials for the actual embroidery will be dependent on the garment. Depending on the item the embroidery can be done with wools, silk, linen and metal threads.