The Busserull and What to Buy

This module rebuilds North House Folk School’s five-day class Sew Your Own Scandinavian Work Shirt, taught by Caroline Feyling and, before her, Carol Colburn. Students bring about 3 yards of all-natural woven cotton or cotton/linen, 5 or 6 buttons, thread, and a hand-sewing kit, and choose among six pattern sizes; it’s suited to advanced beginners ¹. North House doesn’t publish its lesson plan, so this is a reconstruction from the description, museum shirts, and a published pattern.

What a busserull is

Busserull has been the Nordic name since the 1700s for an overgarment “of simple cut sewn from rectangular pieces,” first a seaman’s work shirt and later everyday workwear ². The word came through Low German from the French bourgeron ². In the late 1800s it was worn by railroad workers, loggers, builders, farmhands, harbor workers, and fishermen. Near 1900 the red or blue with white stripes became a national symbol, and Norwegian-Americans in rural Wisconsin wore busserulls from the 1870s until overalls replaced them in the 1920s ³.

The construction is consistent across museum shirts ^{3 4}:

• A band collar.
• A shoulder yoke (akslaug) that extends over the upper arm.
• A placket at the neck, buttoned partway down the chest, or a full-length opening.
• Straight-set sleeves with square underarm gussets, pleated into a buttoned cuff.
• Side slits at the hem, and sometimes a half belt across the back.

Real measurements

Three museum shirts give working numbers:

• A shirt at the Arctic University Museum in Tromsø has a back length of about 76 cm, back width 57 cm, sleeve about 54 cm, a doubled yoke, a three-button placket, sleeves pleated 2 front and 2 back at the top and 6 at the wrist, and the gusset cut in one with the sleeve front ⁵.
• A Lands Museum shirt has a 9 x 9 cm gusset and 5 cm side slits ⁶.
• A Hadeland Folkemuseum shirt is a poncho cut, the body from one length of cloth folded at the shoulder, with a 22 cm yoke whose stripes run the same way as the body ⁴.

Fabric

Traditional busserull cloth is a striped cotton twill. Vesterheim’s store in Decorah, Iowa, sells Solberg busserull fabric, 54 inches wide, in a 3-yard cut for one shirt, navy or red ⁷. For a lighter shirt, a yarn-dyed cotton/linen stripe works well; Fabricsight sells a 55% linen, 45% cotton blue-and-white stripe, about 59 inches wide ⁸. Prewash any cotton or linen before cutting.

Pattern and sizing

Folkwear’s #149 Norwegian Busserull comes in sizes XS to 3XL, with a finished chest from 48 3/4 to 72 inches and a back length from 26 1/2 to 29 inches. On 45-inch fabric it takes 2 1/8 yards (XS-S) to 3 1/2 yards (XL-3XL); on 60-inch fabric, 1 3/4 to 2 1/4 yards. Notions: six 1/2-inch buttons, plus two 1-inch D-rings if you add the back belt ⁹.

To draft your own, measure an old, comfortable work shirt: its chest width, back length, and sleeve length from the shoulder point. Each body half is a rectangle that wide and that long plus hem; each sleeve is a rectangle the sleeve length by a generous width (try about 1 1/2 times your upper-arm circumference as a starting point), pleated down to the cuff; the yoke is a strip across the shoulders. Make a quick muslin from an old sheet before cutting good cloth.

Try it

Lay out the paper pattern, or your drafted rectangles, on your fabric before cutting, and check the stripes: the museum shirts run them up and down on both body and yoke ⁴. Decide now which way they’ll run on the cuffs and collar band.