Crocheting an Edwardian Corset Cover for My Summer Wardrobe

Hello and welcome back. Hello! I feel like every time I say hello now Nutella wants to say hello too. I hope the background noise isn't too loud. It's my, uh, I call it the attack of the machines because I have every possible machine running at the same time because she's not a fan of the washing machine or the dishwasher. I know you're a bit stressed, right? So I tend to just run them all at once. I hope it's not too loud in the background. If you watched my last video then you'll know that I came up with the kind of ridiculous plan, I guess, to create my entire summer wardrobe over the next few weeks and this will be me making my first piece so I can finally stop wearing my pajamas all day. The pajamas are very comfortable but I am ready to start wearing real outdoor clothes again. The first clothing item I am starting with is going to be my camisole top. I found this corset cover, I guess, that's from I would guess the Edwardian era slash 19 teens. So using that as my base inspiration I then went and I looked at the antique pattern library or antique reference pattern reference. I forget the name. I'll put the link in the description. It has antique patterns not just for knitting and crocheting but a bunch of different things. All for free and available online which I love as pdf versions and I found this one particular book from the 19 teens with a crochet yoke in it that I just couldn't get out of my mind so I decided that that would be the yoke that I would use to reproduce this camisole top. I also have some cotton fabric left over in my stash that I'll use to make the body portion below the yoke. I have all the materials, I have my pattern, and I am going to go ahead and get started with my crochet. As the pattern recommended I used crochet cotton number 50 cotton thread and it is the smallest cotton thread that I've ever used and I used my 0.6 millimeter crochet hook which I've used one time before this. As I was working on my project I relied heavily on my magnifying glass when doing this work just because it was so small to see. I'll leave a link in the description if you are also interested in getting a magnifying glass like this. What's great is I can also work at night because it has a light that surrounds the magnifying glass so I find this very very useful when working on small and delicate things like this crochet yoke. I think what made this particular pattern for yoke stand out to me is that it included some crocheting techniques that I've used before and that is the filet crochet. The medallions are six by six filet crochet background pieces which seemed a lot less intimidating than some of the more intricate crochet designs that I've seen. I don't feel like I quite have the techniques down yet to try some more intricate patterns. As you can see here I am nearly done with the first medallion of six by six filet crochet squares and then what you do after that is you go around the pattern piece with a double crochet. Now I believe this is a UK crochet instruction double crochet. Thankfully this particular pattern booklet has a very detailed description of what they mean by double crochet at the beginning and something that I didn't know until recently is that the US and UK definitions for double crochet and basically every single crochet stitch are vastly different so just be a little bit cautious on what terms you're working in to make sure you're making it to the right size. After fully finishing the double crochet border around my first medallion it was time to start the second medallion and what's kind of neat about this is that I'm never breaking the crochet thread really, at least not when I'm making the straight strips. So I make one strip like this for the front and then another strip for the back and the front is slightly longer than the back. I did decide to go a little bit smaller than the pattern recommended just because I measured the size of one of these medallions and I realized that it might be a little bit big if I did it in the original pattern sizes. In case you're curious the original pattern says 10 for the front 9 for the back and I just did 9 for the front and 8 for the back. To give you a little better idea of how this looks when you have two of these medallions done, this is my second medallion ever that I crocheted and I'm really enjoying the look of this pattern coming together. You keep going until you have as many medallions in a row as you need. I believe this is the 8 or 9, maybe the 9 one for the front and then I also needed to make the 8 one for the back. To join the front of the yoke to the back of the yoke you will use the sleeve. I decided to make three medallions and then join it at my first corner of the front portion of the yoke if that makes any sense at all. I'm joining here at the corner so as I'm making the double crochet border around this medallion I'm just incorporating that long strip of 9 medallions I made before for the front. That stitch was a little bit fiddly but after I'm done this is what it looks like. I've joined it at a 90 degree angle and I am going to continue doing the double crochet border all around the side of this third medallion on the sleeve and then just continue making medallions until it's jimed to join the back portion of the yoke and then go all the way around and connect it back to the top of the shoulder for this sleeve. So after some concentration and time and making sure I didn't twist any of my medallion chains my first sleeve was attached to the front and back of my yoke and I was incredibly happy that I was finally able to try on a portion of this top. Before adding the second sleeve it is recommended in the pattern that you add the rest of the decorations to the first sleeve and I thought this was a good idea to give myself a little bit of practice on these three border stitches. The three rows aren't so involved but I think that they add a lot of detail and a lot of intricate extra to the design of the yoke and I really like how it turned out. It really didn't seem all that difficult but I feel like it added a lot of extra character to the yoke. After finishing the three border edges on my one sleeve I then did all of the same work for the second sleeve attaching the front the back and doing three border trim rows and I finally had a yoke with two sleeves that I could try on with some really nice border detail on the sleeves. I wanted to try it on at this point because I was a little bit curious about how much extra ease I had given myself in the front and the back. I did want to create a little bit of a gathered effect across the front of this top like I saw in the example and I was a little worried that it might have still made it a little bit too wide at the front but I decided to keep going at this point anyway and add the three border crochet details to the front and back of the yoke as well as across the shoulders. Interestingly enough when I added the extra border details to the front top and bottom of the yoke it really kind of pulled it together a little bit which I was glad at the time but looking back maybe I would have added a little bit more ease just because it allows for a little bit more of the gathers to happen when you attach the cotton portion to this top. Speaking of which I then attached a length of cotton to the bottom of the yoke to finish off the top and I added some ribbons as well to pull the yoke a little bit tighter to my body and add a little bit of the ruching effect that I saw in the original as well. And there we have it! My first piece of my summer wardrobe is now complete. I've already worn this a few times. I find it very very comfortable especially because we've had over 90 degrees Fahrenheit weather here for the last week and it is such a nice top to wear. Right now I have to wear it with my jeans or my pajama bottoms because I don't have anything else to wear with it but I love the versatility how loose and flowy it is and how light it is but it's still pretty opaque so I feel pretty comfortable wearing it. As in the original if I want to add a little bit more definition to my waist especially when I'm wearing this with non-high rise pants or bottoms I can tie a little bit of ribbon around my waist. Overall I'm super happy with how this turned out. It was very very very delicate crochet work and I always say I'm never going to do it again but I always end up doing it again because I just love how it ends up looking. Thank you so so much for watching! If you'd like to support me or follow me anywhere else you can check out the description for links to my other social media pages. I'll also leave links in the description for the original inspiration piece that I got for this top as well as the pattern that I used and where I got the number 50 crochet cotton thread because I had to go to a special supplier for that. I couldn't find that anywhere else. Thank you again and I will see you next time as I make some more of my summer wardrobe!