It is a fact fairly widely acknowledged, that those who wear quite sober clothes (whether for professional reasons or otherwise) often make an exception for novelty socks. Others, even more covertly, wear brightly patterned underwear (generally a secret unless you get hit by a bus). I myself go in for lively nightwear.
“What could be more fun than a prim floor-length nightie covered in rocket-ships, say, or jelly-beans?” So I wrote back in 2018, and I have not had cause to revise my opinion, barring a minor alteration to ankle-length. It did, however, take some time for my psyche to recover from the epic battle which was the Stripy Nightie of 2018, but time is a great healer (and Covid a great eraser of memory) and here we are.
Back in 2024, needing a nice simple pattern for a summer dress, I was so fortunate as to happen upon the Yan Sewing website and this pattern – or rather diagram – for a nice and simple dress with a yoke and gathers.
And let me tell you, it’s very comfortable. So comfortable, in fact, that it was not long before I was considering making nighties on the same pattern. (Infinitely preferable to revisiting the 2018 debacle.) I would of course need to make some alterations to the pattern, if only because lying on a fastening is not pleasant, whether it’s the tied bow of the original pattern, or the hook and eye I used.
Alas for me, I did not start making progress on the idea until Winter 2025 had already begun – thinking, with my usual genius for inaccurately assessing the amount of effort something will take, that I would have it finished before the winter was out.
The first step was to acquire some fabric. Since this was to be something in the nature of a prototype or trial run, I didn’t want to buy expensive flannelette and then find I’d messed it up beyond recall. So I bought a couple of secondhand sheets, of a distinctly retro nature. Also very comfy, according to the cat.
For this nightie, I made a few alterations. The first was, as stated, to move the neck opening from the back yoke to the front yoke. I raised the neckline, but then had it open right down the front of the yoke, with buttons and loops to close it back up again. (Open for sleeping; closed for pottering downstairs to put on the kettle on a cold winter’s morning.) I also added a small collar to keep any raspy winter dressing gowns off my neck.
The other major change which I made was to convert the yoke to a double yoke. (Insert egg joke here.) I cut two of all the yoke pieces, sewing them together to form an inner yoke and an outer yoke. These are sewn together at the shoulderline, and the raw edges of the bodies (and the top of the sleeve) are sandwiched between them. I made the yoke narrower, too, and the sleeves longer – both to allow for the narrower yoke, and to make them longer in themselves, so I could have them gathered or plain. (The elasticated sleeves on the yellow dress aren’t quite long enough to reach my wrists.)
Alas, I took no construction photos to show the inner workings of the collar, or the double yoke, or the complexities I embroiled myself in by not allowing for seams in the width of the bodies – I ended up having to completely recalculate the pleats.
But I did take a photo of the completed yoke section, framed so as to neatly conceal the fact that it has neither sleeves nor bodies, and is therefore little more than a severely era-confused unfinished partlet. The buttons are coconut; the loops are made from a bit of fabric I happened to have about the place, which I suspect may be polycotton, but which had the merit of matching the main fabric quite nicely while being much thinner than flannel.
In the end, I finished the nightgown just before Christmas – an excellent time of year for flannel nightwear in the Northern Hemisphere, but regrettably summery here. (For a given value of summery. It was reasonably warm, but poured with rain till nearly February.) It was only, therefore, in the last few weeks that the Retro Nightgown, as I have dubbed it, first had a chance for a test wear.
Unfortunately, that revealed that part of the front body had not been properly secured between the inner and outer yokes, and I had to resew it. But since then it has survived a number of wears and a couple of washes. And here it is, in all its retro glory:
I am of course going to make some more. If I started now, I might conceivably finish one before winter ends, but I have other priorities needing to be attended to. Next on my sewing list are some new masks (super-K is icumen in), and some non-nightgown warm winter flannelly things. Possibly even from this retro fabric, since the nightgown used less than one whole queen size sheet, and I bought a pair.
For the first non-prototype nightgown, I am thinking of a cheerful red tartan which, though not in my possession, is at least for sale within my occasional reach. Who knows what succeeding seasons may bring in the world of fabric design? Rocket-ships and jelly-beans may yet be mine.