Victorian Winter Petticoat

Hello everyone and welcome back to another historical knitting video. I'm really excited to share some more progress I've made this time on my outfit that I'm hoping to make mostly by hand from 1892 knitting and sewing patterns. If you followed my progress so far you'll know that I've actually completed a set of stockings as well as my combinations and I've trimmed my 1890s corset. At this point it's actually time for me to knit the petticoat or the warm underskirt. I wasn't exactly sure if it was realistic that women in 1892 would wear knit petticoats but after doing some searching online I did find two examples of petticoats from the 1800s for sale on Etsy that I believe were crocheted as well as knit. The other clue that women actually wore these knit petticoats is the fact that there are quite a few examples of knit petticoats and skirts in my original copy of The Art of Knitting which is published in 1892. After debating which skirt design to choose I ended up deciding that I would knit the number 33 knitted skirt because I really like the chevron design and the separate panel construction. I will link the free online pdf version of this set of instructions down below so if you want to knit this yourself you're free to interpret this pattern as well. I will say that there are a few parts that are left up to your interpretation as a knitter so what I decided to do was knit up the instructions that I ended up creating and working off of when I was knitting this skirt together and if you'd like to purchase that which has a few more instructions, a few more numbers, a few more construction hints, then I'll put that link down below too which you can purchase but like I said the free version is also available and you're more than welcome to work off of that. I'm excited let's get started! This skirt is constructed as a series of chevron shaped panels. Each panel is knit beginning at the bottom of the panel towards the top so I actually begin by casting on 41 stitches in my contrasting blue color. The yarn that I'm using is Lion Brand acrylic yarn which I needed in large quantities for this skirt so that's why I chose that particular yarn. There are two steps required to make the chevron shape of each piece. The first is at the start of each row to make a stitch. The instructions don't say exactly which way to make a stitch and I tried out a few different ways and I decided just to knit in the front and the back loop. Then after you've knit off 19 stitches or you have 20 stitches on your right needle, you knit three together in the center and you do that by slipping a stitch, knitting two together, and then passing that slip stitch over. While you always make a stitch at the beginning of every row, you only knit three together every other row. You continue knitting in this exact same fashion as you work up the entire piece. Here you can see how I'm working some color changes and quite the mess that those tail ends leave behind. And here you can see that I've just finished all of the different color changes which are at the tip of this skirt panel. At this point it's time just to continue in my main color which is gray all the way up the rest of the panel. Now for the next while it says to just continue knitting in exactly the same way to create that chevron shape all the way up and then about two-thirds of the way up the panel to decrease the needle size in order to put in some skirt shaping. It doesn't say exactly how long to make each skirt panel so this is a bit of a guess but you can see here that at this point this is about the length that I decided to knit in completely the exact same way and at this time I decided to decrease. I did try using that trick that they said in the instructions to decrease a needle size in order to get the shaping to happen but I found that for me at least in my attention it really wasn't working. So what I decided to do instead was just not do the increases at the beginning of each row for the next maybe double length a little bit less than double length of what I've knit so far. So I also did this shaping slightly differently. Here I am quite happy with the length of this skirt panel and the instructions at this point say just to finish off the piece here but as you can see that it leaves kind of a v-shape at the top and I thought that would be difficult to sew onto the yoke or the top of the skirt so I decided to fill it in with a few short rows here and I just used the you know basic wrap and turn for my short rows to kind of fill in that space and create a straighter top for me to have a little bit of an easier time sewing it onto the skirt yoke. I think the short rows did the trick they really kind of filled in that area where the v used to be you can see there I'm pointing out where the v was coming down to before I did these short rows and looking back I'm actually very glad that I did this. So at this point since I'm happy with how it looks I decided to cast off. I used a very stretchy cast off the stretchiest one that I know. Now that I have this one panel done I've got five more to go or at least that was my initial calculation is that I would knit a total of six panels. After many more hours I finally have a lovely pile of skirt panels that I can now sew in all the ends for which to be honest I'm wish I would have sewn in the ends as I was going along. The mess of the ends that I needed to sew in at the color changes at the bottom took quite a long time and it was very daunting and I put this off for quite a while before actually finishing this. Something else to keep in mind is that because all of the ends are on the exact same side and just right next to each other that side does get a bit thick and stiff so I did my best to spread it out a little bit but it does still kind of affect how the fabric feels in that one spot. And at this point it's actually time to finally sew the panels together I was really excited. I went with a suggestion in the instructions which is to do a crocheted version of connecting the different panels and I just used a simple slip stitch which may have been a single stitch at the time but that's what I thought worked well for me. I wish I would have lined up the stripes a little bit better but overall I really like how the panels came together. This was much faster work than the knitting than sewing in the ends that had come before and I was really excited to see the skirt coming together but you can see after putting three panels together I do have some puckering and some bulging so I decided to block my skirt panels at this point. If you didn't want such aggressive blocking you could just kind of put the steam above it. This is acrylic so the plastic kind of melts pretty easily with the steam. Because I only had enough yarn for six panels and I did the math on my measurements I knew that I had to block it quite aggressively so you can see me stretching it and steaming it and actually ironing it quite a bit here to stretch out the panels that I did have to make it actually fit me in the end. And here are all six of my skirt panels sewn together. This was really exciting to see and I was very excited to see how the chevron lines actually lined up at the bottom and the beautiful effect that that had or at least it did in my opinion. At this point it was time for me to kind of hold it against me to see how deep I wanted that top yoke of my skirt to be. So I was holding it against my body just to kind of see at what height I wanted the yoke to be so that the skirt length was the length that I was really looking for. Now there's one last sentence to these set of instructions which is to sew this knitted skirt to a deep yoke of white linen. And I don't know about you but I have very little sewing experience so for me this actually took longer sewing the yoke and creating the yoke than knitting the skirt. And here you can see me taking the measurements for the yoke itself. I decided to make a paper mock-up first and because I don't really have any drafting paper I decided to use a tip that I learned I believe it was from Bernadette Banner's videos which is to use wrapping paper. And what I realized now is that on the inside they actually have a perfect one inch grid so I was able to measure out exactly how much wrapping paper I needed to create the mock that I was looking for. So I did all of my pattern drafting, if you can call it that, that sounds really fancy for what I actually was doing, on the fold so that I could just draft out half of it and it would be equal on both sides. I decided to make my skirt yoke three inches deep and I tried to follow the design of what I could see in the pattern as close as possible so I was trying to create a bit of a curved edge. I wasn't exactly sure how curved I had to make it in order for it to fit around my body which is why I decided to make the mock-ups out of paper in the first place. My first paper mock-up wasn't very promising at all. I had definitely not gotten the curve right so I went back to the drawing board or drawing paper and tried it again with a more severe curve. That one didn't quite cut it and I tried a few more by hand and in the end I ended up just creating this particular paper mock-up which I cut together from a few different pieces and then taped to my body in exactly the angle that would be needed and then finally created this paper mock-up which I think when I tried it on looks pretty okay. The back and the front meet at almost the exact same height and nothing looks particularly like it's out of place or not really sitting right. So I decided to actually finally create a mock-up version from the fabric that I have which unfortunately isn't linen. I couldn't find it at my store but this is the first time buying fabric so maybe I wasn't looking correctly. It is cotton and you can see that I am trying to also add seam allowances here just a half an inch on each side. After trying this actual cloth mock-up I'm really happy with how it looks. I will say that the fabric is quite thin so when I actually ended up sewing the yoke together I cut out another layer, another similar layer, just to double up on the fabric. I probably should have used interfacing but I wasn't thinking about that at the time. Here you can see I think maybe my third attempt at sewing a yoke together. I bought two yards of fabric and ended up using it all because I had to redo this so many times. I am very inexperienced when it comes to sewing so I'm pretty proud of what this looks like but I definitely know that I have a very far way to go. The other thing that I'll say is that it is really hard trying to fit something on yourself so you can see me here trying to figure out exactly where the overlap should be so that I could sew this edge down appropriately on both sides. I was also pretty nervous about the buttons and the buttonholes and the buttonhole placement and the button placement because I did want it to fit properly but going off of someone else's suggestion I didn't realize that Bernadette Banner also had quite a few tutorial or instruction videos on how to sew and some of them included the buttonhole tutorial which I tried to follow here. You can see that I had a few misguided attempts but in the end I did actually manage to create some buttonholes which maybe aren't the most beautiful in the world but do work and I'm actually quite proud of because I sewed them by hand. I was also really happy because my interesting attempts at trying to fit this on myself worked and I believe that the button placement is correct and the yoke will fit me but I will have to try to lace up very similarly each time that I wear this outfit. That's one thing looking back where maybe I would have diverted a bit from the design that they have in the book and not use buttons or maybe added a second row of buttons so that depending on how tightly I closed my corset that day, I guess depending on how much I ate, I can change the size of the skirt yoke. And now it's actually time to attach the knitted skirt panels to the yoke of the skirt itself. This part I thought wouldn't be quite so difficult but trying to pin the knitted portion to the cotton proved very difficult and I was also traveling this week so I am not in my usual environment and I didn't have a sewing machine so I ended up having to sew the bottom seam by hand which once again Bernadette Banner had a fantastic hand sewing tutorial. Unfortunately because of my inexperience I still had to redo it a few times but in the end I'm pretty proud of the result even if it does need quite a bit of improvement in the future. In case anyone's curious I ended up using the back stitch to attach the skirt to the yoke just because Bernadette did say that it was for things that require some sturdiness and the skirt is quite heavy so that's why I wanted some sturdy stitches to hold it in place. And there you have it, my completed skirt! I'm actually very happy with how this turned out. I will say that there is a lot that I can see that has a really big room for improvement especially with the sewing at the yoke portion but overall I'm really pleased with how this turned out. I also ended up following the illustration that came with the pattern and sewing up the panels in the back part way though it does look a bit wonky and that fit I think could be improved. If anyone's curious at all it took me about five hours to complete each skirt panel from the first stitch to sewing in all of the ends. Since I sewed six panels that took me about 30 hours of knitting work. Each panel has approximately 6,000 stitches so the entire skirt has 36,000 stitches and I counted together the hours for actually sewing the yoke and attaching the skirt to the yoke and it took me about 25 hours. So this took me about 55 hours to complete and about 36,000 knit stitches. Thank you so much for watching! If you enjoyed this video feel free to give me a thumbs up. If you want to see more videos like this go ahead and subscribe and I can't wait to see you all again next time. Oh and if anyone has any suggestions for more sewing tutorials or sewing videos that I can learn from please do let me know because I definitely need all the help that I can get.