Tutorial: Sew a Linen Bocksten Tunic with French Seams
The linen “Bocksten-style” tunic is immensely popular in LARP, SCA, and Dagorhir. It’s as comfy as pajamas, but it has perfect range of motion. It looks good on everyone, but it’s easy to fit. It’s simple to cut, but it uses fabric efficiently. It’s the ideal garment, and everyone should have one.
But a tunic is only as good as its seam finish. Weak seams mean your tunic won’t withstand running through the woods or fighting in a shield press, and raw edges mean your tunic might fall apart in the wash.
My garb shop, Tailored Tunics, specializes in making incredibly sturdy versions of this tunic in linen. Over five years (and hundreds of tunics), I’ve perfected my methods for making the perfect French seamed linen tunic, and now I want to pass my methods on to you!
This tutorial is kind of endless, so a lot of things have been split off into separate tutorials. Before you start, please look at:
Linen FAQ: A Primer on Where to Buy it and What to Do With It. This will tell you how to get the best deal on linen fabric, and how to pre-wash it so it won’t shrink.
Alric’s Bocksten tunic tutorial, which will acquaint you with the general idea of the Bocksten tunic’s pattern,
My Measure and draft a better Bocksten tunic for my improvements on Alric’s pattern,
How (and why) to sew a French seam for garb so you’ll understand how to sew the basic seam, and
The Sew a Keyhole Neckline with a Facing tutorial. Facings are far stronger and neater than hems for tunic necklines, so I highly suggest you learn to use them. They’re really quite easy!
Sew the tunic: first steps
1. Prepare your pieces
Your tunic is made up of one torso panel, two sleeves, two underarm gussets, a neckline facing, two side gores, and two center gores. You’ll need about 2.5 yards of 60″ wide fabric for all this, depending on your size.
Your torso panel is a long rectangle. It is twice as long as you want your tunic to be, because it’s both the tunic’s front and the back. There is no shoulder seam, so instead you’ll want to mark the shoulder point. The shoulder point is exactly halfway down the panel, so fold the panel in half and mark that point.
ie, if you have a 22” x 82” rectangle, fold until you have a 22” x 41” rectangle, and hit the 22" long fold with your iron to crease. This is the torso shoulder point.
Cut two slits for the inset gores. These slits should be 1/2″ shorter than your gores, so if you have gores that are 23.5″ tall, cut your slits 23″ up from the hems.
Mark the midway point at the top of your sleeve. ie, if your sleeve is 18” wide at the top, mark it at 9”. This is the sleeve shoulder point.
Trim your gores. You’ll notice that the gores are cut as triangles. This means that they’re longer on the hypoteneuse than they are tall. Since we want our gores to hang evenly, trim the excess fabric at the bottom of the gores away so the edges are the same length as the gore’s height.
The next two steps won’t be French seamed yet, because they’re the neckline and the inset center front and back gores.
2. Sew the neckline with a facing
Before sewing the inset gores, I sew the neckline onto the body panel using this method. Since we’re using linen, the raw edge of the facing ought to be finished, or it will fray in the wash. The easiest way to do this is to serge or zigzag the raw, outside edge of the facing.
I recommend sewing the neck facing as the very first step. It’s one of the most difficult part of sewing a tunic, so if you’re going to botch it, best botch it before you’ve sunk more labor into your project. Again, use this tutorial to learn how to sew a neckline facing.
3. Sew the inset gores.
Use “whole” gores for the inset gores, not ones that are pieced together along one side. Now, French seams only let you insert a piece into a seam, not a slit that’s closed on one end. On the Bocksten tunic, this means the inset gores cannot be French seamed into the slit.
Instead, you’ll finish (via a serger/overlocker or a tight zig-zag stitch) the long sides of the inset gores, then do the same to the slits that the gores will go into. This binds the raw edges of both pieces, preventing fraying. If you’re serging, you won’t be able to get to the very top of the slit without mishap, so switch to zigzagging on your sewing machine for the top 2”.
Pay close attention to the very tops of the gore and the slit, which are the most fray-prone. Remember, gore and slit should be finished separately, then sewn together. This ensures that the raw edges on both sides are properly bound and won’t fray.
The edges of your inset gores might be slightly warped after you serge or zigzag them, because this is a really stretchy edge. A light touch with an iron will coax the edges flat again.
La Cotte Simple has a good tutorial explaining how to sew inset gores. The trick is to remember that at the very top, the gore will have the same seam allowance, but the slit’s seam allowance will shrink to almost nothing. If you need another example, check out By My Measure’s longer tutorial for sewing an inset gore by machine.
Once the gores are inset, press the seams. I like to have the seam allowances pointing towards the side seams. This will make the seams look tidier from the outside. Always try to iron linen only from the wrong side of your fabric. There’s a tiny chance that your linen might get shiny when pressed on the right side, so it’s safest to not risk it.
Sew the tunic: sub-assembly with French seams
4. Sew the sleeve to the gusset
Alric’s tutorial tells you to sew the sleeve to the torso panel, then to sew the gusset into the corner between the sleeve and torso panel, but it is vastly easier and faster to sew the sleeve to the gusset before you sew anything to the torso panel.
The gusset is stitched to the side of the sleeve at the sleeve’s top, along the straight 6″ edge.
5. Assemble the side gores
These ‘pieced’ side gores are assembled from two right triangles, which French seamed together along the straight of the grain (not the bias-cut hypotenuse!).
If you have enough fabric to you cut out your gores like this, you only have to piece one side gore– all the rest will be whole triangles!
I like things to match, though, so I fold the other side gore in half and run a false seam down it. Now they match!
Why use these seamed gores for the sides instead of for the center front and back gores? It’s hard to line up the seam on the pieced gores with the exact middle of the slit, so I save them for the sides.
Sew the tunic: attach the sleeve-and-gusset and side gores to the torso panel
Remember to note which side of your torso panel is the “right” side before you start sewing sleeves and gores to the torso panel. This is another reason why it’s best to sew the inset gores and neckline facing on early: they’ll help you distinguish the ‘right’ side from the ‘wrong.’
6. Attach sleeve-and-gusset to torso panel
Match the sleeve shoulder point to the torso shoulder point, pin. Sew the sleeve-and-gusset construction to the torso panel using a French seam. Remember to not sew (or, god forbid, SERGE) over your pin!
Again, it’s helpful to remember that the shoulder point on the sleeve bisects the sleeve, not entire the sleeve-and-gusset combo. If your sleeve’s top is 18” wide, the shoulder point is 9” (ie, half the sleeve) down.
7. Attach the side gores to the torso panel
The side gore must be placed below the side of the sleeve that has the gusset. If you sew it to the side of the sleeve without the gusset, you’ll place the side gore way too high, and it won’t be long enough to reach the bottom of the tunic.
Measure down 4” from the bottom of the gusset to figure out where to start the side gore. If you know you’re going to wear your tunic pouched up with a belt, you could place the gore further down, but I think 4″ looks best. Leaving a gap between the bottom of the gusset and the top of the gore gives your tunic a visual 'waist.’
French seam the gore to the torso panel.
Advanced Technique: If you’re an impatient jerk like me, you can attach the sleeve-and-gusset piece and the side gores to the torso panel all in one seam, like so. I find this to be trickier to pin and measure but much faster to sew.
If you adopt this technique, treat the whole side like it is one long seam, instead of sewing and turning the sleeve piece and gores separately. That’s the beauty of French seams: long straight lines, not individual seams, are what’s important.
Sewing the tunic: sew the sleeves and side seams closed
8. Fold gusset edge up to meet sleeve edge.
Pin your sleeve closed along the orange line.
You’ll be sewing your sleeve closed in one long seam from wrist to gusset. Work from wrist to gusset, not gusset to wrist. As you sew, you’ll very slightly stretch the side of the sleeve that has the gusset on it. You want this to be just slightly longer than the other side, so you’ll have a bit of fabric to work with once you’re sewing the other side of the gusset to the tunic’s side.
French seam your sleeve.
9. Hem your sleeves.
Make sure to fold your hem up twice to enclose all raw edges.
10. Bring your only unsewn gusset edge to the side of the torso panel. Sew side seams closed.
This is the most difficult part of French seaming a Bocksten tunic, both to sew and to describe.
The first problem lies right where the top gusset corner meets the torso panel– in that 90 degree corner under the sleeve. If you didn’t slightly stretch the sleeve in step #8, you may have very little seam allowance to work with at this corner while sewing wrong sides together. This happens, but it’s not a huge problem: just start sewing with an almost nonexistent seam allowance and go very slowly, gradually expanding your seam allowance to the normal ¼" seam allowance.
If you did stretch this, you’ll have seam allowance on the gusset side and very little on the body panel side. When you sew this, make sure you catch both layers.
The second problem (which isn’t a very difficult one, but can be hard to understand) is sewing the bottom gusset corner to the torso panel. It is very easy to catch the bottom corner of the gusset wrong, producing a nasty lump, or miss it entirely, leaving a gap.
The solution is to not think of this as a bottom corner. Your gusset, though it looks like a right triangle right now, is still a square pattern piece.
Pivot it out, pulling it from behind the tunic, until it again looks like a square.
Tada! You’re no longer sewing to a point– you’re just continuing one of those long straight seams that French seams love.
Continue your seam down the side, sewing the free edge of the gore to the torso panel. The top of the gore can be bulky, so go slow and take your time. Trim the entire seam and flip the tunic to the inside to prepare for the second pass.
The top gusset corner is tricky when doing the second pass of the French seam: if you aren’t careful, you’ll either get a pucker here or let the raw edge fray through. The trick is to start sewing this higher up than you need to, on the original sleeve-to-body-panel seam that you sewed back in step #6.
Sew this pass all the way down to the hem. Be careful catching the top of the side gore, again. You might need to slow down and ease your needle through this part.
Finishing the tunic: inspecting and hemming
11. Flip the tunic right side out.
Make sure you don’t have any raw edges poking through your seams. This sometimes happens if you didn’t trim your seams in pass #1 enough. This will look like a cut edge poking through your seam.
If you find any of these stray “whiskers of thread,” just trim it off as best you can, flip the tunic inside out, and stitch the “second pass” between the sleeve and the gusset again, this time using a slightly wider seam allowance.
Flip it back out and check that the whiskers are all now safely sewn into the “second pass” of your French seam.
12. Let the tunic hang overnight before hemming.
The diagonally-cut (bias) parts of the gores are more elastic than the straight seams, so they’ll sag under their own weight, given time. Therefore, you won’t want to hem your tunic immediately. Hang your tunic for a day before you trim and hem it.
Here’s one I made! If you don’t have a dress form, try to use something sturdier than a thin wire hanger– the tunic has a lot of fabric in it, so suspending it by the neck on a thin wire hanger has tiny chance of stretching the neckline out.
Mark your tunic’s hem so it’s even, then trim away any excess. Marking is easiest and most accurate if you can get the recipient to model the tunic for you. Here’s a great tutorial on how to mark and trim a level hem.
Sewing over the bulky French seam seam allowance will be easier if you trim them off at an angle at the bottom, like this. Don’t trim them too close– just nip off a little on the bottom, oh, ¼-3/8″ on your tunic. Your hem will also be easier to sew if all the seams lay in the same direction, ie, with the “open” part of the seam allowance going “downstream” of your stitching, rather than fighting as you sew past it, so press your seam allowances so they all lay one way.
Turn the hem up twice and hem using a narrow hem. The narrow hem may be intimidating, but it’s much easier to sew a narrow hem on a curvy tunic skirt than it is to fold up a wide one. If you have a serger, you can serge around the bottom of your hem, then use the line of serging as a guide to help you fold up the hem.
Press the finished hem.
13. Give everything one last press and you’re done!
Yay! Now you may prance around in your tunic. Twirl! Fight! Build outfits around ‘em! I wear my tunics with trousers for basic fighting garb, but I also wear them underneath cotehardies, surcoats, and apron dresses. Add a skirt and a bodice and they pass as a chemise for later-period lady-garb; distress ‘em and they work for monsters, lengthen ‘em and they become gowns, shorten ‘em and they work for Crusaders. They’re great for everyone from Anglo-Saxons to Vikings to Normans to 14th century peasants. So even if your first French seamed linen tunic didn’t work out perfectly, you’ll have plenty of opportunities for pratice: go make one for everyone you know!
