(gentle music) - [Narrator] In my endeavor
to construct a Worth-like gown for the elusive 1890s ball
that has now time traveled into 2021, I will be needing a petticoat. Not the trash cotton muslin
one with the overlocked hem, elastic waistband and
otherwise unfinished seams that I made when I was 16; no. A real, proper, grown
Up Victorian petticoat out of silk taffeta, with
pin tucks and lace insertion and stupid hook and eye closures. This video is the third
in the 1890s gown series, which has kindly been
sponsored by Skillshare, but more on that anon. For a basic pattern, I consulted our good friend Agnes Walker, a free digitized copy of her book, "Manual of Needlework and Cutting Out" which can be found in the
description box below. You may recognise this from the combinations
project I did last year. Referencing the diagram in
Agnes Walker for pattern shapes, I proceeded to design the petticoat according to contemporary examples listed on the Met Museum's
online collection; this informed me where would be logical to put lace, frills, pin tucks, etc. If you watched the first
part in this video series, in which I venture out
to purchase the materials for this project, you'll know that I found these two beautiful laces at Mokuba that I intended to put to on a petticoat; so I'm incorporating
these into the design. Let me just say: having the right lace for
Victorian underthings is crucial. If I hadn't found these laces that were just the right
quality and design, properly reminiscent of
actual 19th century lace I would not have bothered
to make this petticoat. On a project like this,
the lace, however small, should be the biggest investment. I have just traced off the
petticoat pattern from this. I've only gone down to about the knee so I've made them 24
inches long which is still a little bit longer than they need to be, I was just measuring
from my waist to my knee, but of course did not accommodate
for this little four-inch yoke that goes on at the waistband which is this bit here so it's
a bit long and I know that and that's good because I have some room to play with whatever height this pretty, frilly, floofy bit will be. So this strip here is going
to be one and a half times- wait, is that math? It's going to be double, and OK. So whatever the length of
this finished hem here, of this knee-length petticoat
bit, it will be that plus another one plus one half of that. That will be the length of
this, this will get gathered onto this to make a little floof layer and then there will be some pin tucks, there will be this
insertion going in there and then this edging lace
will sit on the edge. So I have enough of this, I
don't have enough of this. I'm going to start just by
cutting out these upper bits of the white silk taffeta that
I have to make this petticoat out of and start getting
these seamed together. I'm going to worry about this later once I have this together
and I want to get this fitted and all nice and done and put together and then we'll start messing with this because this is where the
finicky and expensive stuff starts to happen so I want to
make sure all of this works, all of the proportions are
correct, before we get into this. This silk taffeta was not purchased during my project shopping
escapade back in ye olden days before the plague, but instead was ordered from Burnley & Trowbridge who, thankfully, were still shipping as normal. In an effort to avoid poking unnecessary holes into the taffeta, which is prone to show holes, I'm weighting rather than pinning the pattern pieces for tracing, with the trusty assistance
of sundry household objects. Once the pieces are cut out, I can go ahead and pin together my skirt panels, and begin stitching. "Authentic Victorian
Dressmaking Techniques", a reprint of a 1905 sewing manual, instructs that while smaller undergarments are frequently made by hand, quote "the amount of work necessary
to make night-dresses "and petticoats inclines one
toward the machine method." So I shall be constructing the main seams for this petticoat on my
appropriately 1891 machine. I should also note that there is a placket at the centre back opening, which gets stitched round three sides, leaving the long side to be
attached to the skirt opening. The yoke piece is likewise
stitched around three sides, with the bottom edge left open for attaching to the skirt part. The skirt seams are French seamed. Once again, "Victorian
Dressmaking Techniques" gives us the instruction that, quote "No raw edges of material
are left at the seams "in this class of work", unquote. Likely because undergarments, which were worn next
or closer to the skin, were frequently washed and
thus needed to be strong. Quote, "Every seam is either
a French seam or is felled. "The French seam is used "at what may be called the
regular seams", unquote, that is to say, the main
long seams of a garment. That curved or upper seam
of the yoke is clipped so that the curve turns smoothly, then it's flipped inside
out and pressed flat. I can then pin just that
inside layer of the placket to the eight-inch opening
left in the centre back of the petticoat seam,
with right sides together, which will allow it to open and close. In retrospect, I didn't
actually need to stitch and turn that top edge
of the placket either it could have just been left raw to line up with the raw
edge of the skirt waist and in fact I did end up
cutting this off later. To finish both the placket
and skirt raw edges on the inside of the petticoat, I turned under the raw edge of the placket and felled this down with tiny stitches. The Victorians were real hype about tiny, almost invisible stitches, so
using some fine silk thread, I'm endeavoring to make my
stitches as small as possible. The other side of the petticoat opening is just finished off by hand
with a quick felled hem. No, I still don't understand
the physics of French seams and ended up with my
pencil marks on the outside instead of the inside and for some reason, shifted the placement of the
placket a bit for no reason, but shh, it's underwear. Insert pointless quip about nobody but the entire internet
ever getting to seeing it. OK, so here we are so far, the seams of the petticoat
are all stitched together, they are French seamed and
pressed and ready to go as well as the waistband is
all prepped and ready to go. This petticoat is obviously
meant to have some gathering at the waistband. I have measured up this
yoke bit to my own waist and figured out how wide
the overlap needs to be so it'll just be like this. I will attach the skirt
all around here up to here but not from here to here
because this will cross over and just sort of lay like that, I don't know if you can
understand right now but you shall see very anon. So what I'm going to do
is I'm going to match up center front and center
front seam obviously, center front of the skirt to
center front of this waistband. I think I only want about
three and half to four inches of gathering at the back
so I will pin it up flat all around there and then the
last two inches on each side I will leave free so that I
can run a gathering thread through the top of this
and then gather it up to fit into this waistband. That's my plan for now. To gather the two halves of the centre back into the remaining yoke bit, I'm running a gathering thread
into the skirt edge by hand: Victorians were likewise
exceedingly passionate about gathers: if you recall
from my combinations video, these were preferred to be as fine, delicate and neat as possible, and instructions for
running gathering threads into fabric in Bertha
Banner's "Household Sewing with Home Dressmaking"
instruct to take up two threads while passing over four. That is correct: two individual
threads of the material are taken onto the needle,
while four are passed over. Pro tip: do not try to
do this by candle light. Pardon the lack of pressing going on here but here's where we are so far. I'm quite happy with how
this waistband is working out and then the rest of the skirt part. So what I have to do now
is I just have to even up this bottom hemline thing
so that I can go ahead and put that little flounce on. I'm just trying to figure out now how high I want that to be. So herein is where we start
to do a little bit of riffing. Making stuff up and just
adding floof and decoration and fun bits. I'm going to cut a little ruffle that will probably be
actually coincidentally the length of the skirt
that I have on right now. That will be all silk
taffeta and then I will add that additional little,
what, three inch edging lace to the hem so it will be
ultimately just probably to the tops of my feet. Obviously you don't want
your petticoat to stick out from underneath your
dress, however I did read in "Authentic Victorian
Dressmaking Techniques" how they specified that evening gowns should not absolutely
under any circumstances lift up off the feet, so
the length of the gown will be quite long so I
probably will have to go a little bit long with this
petticoat just so that it gives that bottom edge enough floof. Before that happens though, I haven't actually finished the yoke edge; so I'm just trimming the
seam allowance at the edge where it's sewn to the skirt,
then, just like the placket, am turning under the yoke edge and felling it down to the skirt
with tiny felling stitches. Then I marked an even line
all round the hem at the point I'd pinned up during the fitting, and chopped off the excess width. The hem is then hemmed by machine. Since this edge will be folded under and will effectively just
become the seam allowance when the flounce gets stitched on, I wasn't worried about putting a fine hand-stitched hem on this and I'm sure the Victorians wouldn't be so worried about that either. OK, so we are now ready to
get started on this flounce. I've gone ahead and I
have worked out some math. I need one foot, 12 inches,
of, well, fabric length plus the additional ruffle bit at the hem. I have subtracted the
bit that's going to be the insertion lace here which
is four and a half inches wide which means I need three and five eighths, two three and five eighths
long, wide- oh my god- two three and five
eighths inch wide strips to go on either side of the
lace, plus an additional inch so four and five eighths
which I'm actually just going to round down to four
and a half inch strips because I'm going to put two
little quarter inch pin tucks. I have done the math and done
it again and done it again to make sure that I have
accommodated enough extra width to allow for the pin tucks
and still have the strips be the correct width
when they're finished. This also means I have
probably done it incorrectly no matter how many times I
do it it's always incorrect so I shall I keep you updated on that. So basically what I'm going
to be doing now is cutting out times two 175 inch long strips. That's four and three quarter yards because what I want the
actual hem on the petticoat right now is currently 70
inches all around the hem and I want the ruffle, in
order to get it to be ruffly to be one and half times that width so I added an additional 70 inches plus 35 inches which comes to
four and three quarter yards. I have more than four
and three quarter yards of this hem lace. I do not, however, have
four and three quarter yards of the insertion lace, I only have about two and three quarters. So what I've done is I have
gone ahead and I have messaged my friends at East Coast Trimming
which by the way friends, have acquired all of the Mokuba stock just so that you know we
can all now rest in peace, East Coast Trimming which
was tied with Mokuba for my favorite trimming shop
and now I mean, by default claims that title in and of itself. So in theory that have
all of the ex-Mokuba stock however I cannot remember if I just bought the entire bolt of this. I'm pretty sure that
I did and I'm not sure if they have another
colorway, I think they may have had a slightly
more white version of it which I would accept but anyway that's all still to come. I think I'm just going to
go ahead and use this anyway because they're not in the store everyday they're only in like
maybe once a week I think. It's probably not going to be in on time for this video to be
released so what I will do is I'll probably baste an extra little bit until I can acquire either
some more of this lace or something very
similar at least in width to replace in the back. (dramatic music) At this point I realised that I was unnecessarily
succumbing to mundanity, which like, don't you
hate when that happens? But never fear, for this is
a challenge quickly remedied with any nearby shears of destiny to liven up the cutting experience. And by liven up I don't even know because these are severely
not meant to be fabric shears so cutting silk with
these is not necessarily the most efficient
experience but it can be done and therefore it will be done. So I ended up cutting
out these 4.5 inch strips from selvedge to selvedge on the material, so there were no raw edges to worry about; I think the width of my
silk was about 45 inches but in any case, I ended up connecting three
strips per half of the flounce, so cutting six strips in total,
and stitching those together into two complete circles
containing three strips each. If that makes sense. Then I'm then once again
putting machine hems on two sides of one strip, but
only one side of the other; the top edge of the top flounce will again be the seam allowance of the
edge connected to the skirt, and the two edges connecting
the insertion lace will have the lace stitched over them, so the stitching doesn't
have to be pretty; the hem edge at the bottom of
the lower flounce, however, will be seen, so I want to
do that nicely by hand later. For the pin tucks, I'm marking the lines
all round each flounce: the first one on the upper flounce, or the flounce with two hems, half an inch up from the bottom, then additional half inches up from there. The bottom flounce, or the one with only the
one single hemmed edge, gets the marks round
from the top edge down, since the tucks will sit on either side closest
to the insertion lace. The bottom flounce, or the
one with only the single hemmed edge, gets the marks
round from the top edge down since the tucks will sit
on either side closest to the insertion lace. These lines are then pinned together so that each pair meets, forming two quarter inch folds sitting just next to each other. Whilst pinning, I was
careful to hold the flounces in their upright positions, so that I can make sure to stitch with what will become the
outward edge facing upwards on the machine so it'll look
nicer and the bobbin side of the stitching, which
sometimes doesn't tend to look as nice, will be folded underneath the tuck when it's pressed down. Yeah, there is a surprising amount of math and geometrical logic
involved in petticoat making. This stuff is kind of no joke. The tucks are then pressed downwards, and before I can proceed onto the lace, I just want to get that final edge of the lower flounce hemmed off. I'm doing this, as mentioned
previously, by hand: and if you'll once again recall
from the combinations video, this is done in the opposite direction from felling stitches in
the previous centuries: that is, with the stitching
done towards the body, or from right to left, rather
than away from the body. This seems like a small and
unnecessary positional change, but it actually causes
the stitches to slant in the opposite direction in this century than they did previously
so it can actually make quite a significant
aesthetic difference. While I was originally taught
to fell the earlier way or away from the body I've actually come to adapt
to this new way just as easily and can use both methods
interchangeably now. And now for the pretty bits! The hem lace is also whipped on by hand; I've just folded over the
upper portion of blank net, and am felling that
folded edge into place, catching only the turned up
edge on the hem of the fabric but not puncturing
through to the right side. This extra bit of net is
then trimmed up to the edge of the flounce hem once
stitching is complete. Now it is finally time to
unite our two flounce pieces by stitching the bit of insertion
lace between each strip. This is, obviously, done by hand with a tiny
running back stitch, which took approximately four millennia, so whilst we pass the time I
shall take this opportunity to tell you about Skillshare,
who have been most wondrously sponsoring this 1890s gown project. Skillshare, if you don't already know, is an online learning
community with thousands of online classes geared
towards creative people, and has been systematically
becoming most familiar company to me during this time of plague as I use my time at home to learn stuff. Most recently I've been taking Video Essentials: Using Lenses
& Lighting to Convey Emotion by Oren Soffer because if you know me, you know I am HYPE for
learning all the things about cinematic storytelling, I.e., making myself better at and just generally more
excited about my job. This course covered some of the things, lighting and lenses, that I admittedly still don't know a whole lot about, so it was supremely valuable to me and I hope, in future, to you! If you wish to join me on
these learning adventures, Skillshare is giving away two free months of premium membership
to the first 1000 people who click the link in the description box to help you explore your creativity. After that, it is only around $10/month. (grand music) So the flounces are now all ready to go. They're all stitched together. One thing that I should
have done previously and that I have actually just
done is I've gone through and I've just starched
the laces just with a bit of modern spray starch
which obviously is not historically accurate,
what I should have done is I should have starched
the strips of lace before I sewed them in. But as you can see if we pick this up, the silk taffeta is much
stiffer and has a lot more body to it than this lace so we
would have a very strange hanging situation if we had
stiff, crumply, stiff, crumply. So I just gone through and
given the lace a bit of a starch just to hold it out a bit. As you can also see, I did
not have nearly enough lace. I think I'm about two yards short on this so what I've done is I've
just temporarily basted a strip of muslin into this
just to hold everything into place but I am
praying to the Mokuba gods that this lace still exists somewhere and that I can actually
go and find some more once lockdown is no longer a thing. So I'm being optimistic. This is just going to remain like this until that happens which
probably won't be in this video because we're just in lockdown
for the foreseeable future. So the next step of course is
to go ahead and start putting our gathering threads into
the top here so that we can go ahead and get the flounce onto the bottom of the petticoat. OK, I'm going to endeavor to
explain this, probably poorly because I cannot get
far away enough probably to actually show you
what I'm talking about. So the ruffle strip flounce
thing- oh it's so pretty!- it's now finished basically. And what it is, it's comprised
of, as you have seen, it's three lengths of taffeta,
lace, lace, stitched together so there are three in the
round there are three lengths. I have gone ahead and
I have divided them up into each third into two so that basically it's divided seam-pin and
that's the halfway point and then seam so that this whole round is divided into six parts
and I've gone through and I have divided up the
circumference of the hem into six parts. That way I can get the gathers
relatively even on here. So I will be gathering
each of these parts down into this length, just in an effort to even out my gathers a little bit. A thing I failed to
explain with the earlier gathering step is the
importance of stroking gathers, or basically just pulling
them straight and laying each fold nice and even after
scrunching up the fabric. Once again, the Victorians were sticklers for neat gathering so I'm endeavoring to make these gathers
behave as much as possible as I pin the flounce to
the rest of the petticoat. Now, normally I would stitch
these gathers on by hand for ultimate delicacy, but
we are getting to the point where we are on a very
historically inaccurate deadline with this project and I can't spare the
extra day to do that, so the next best option is
to stitch it down by machine. This didn't turn out as detrimentally as I thought it would but I think I still do prefer
to stitch gathers on by hand, since you have so much more control over getting them down evenly and don't have to worry
about the machine foot accidentally nudging your
hard-stroked gathering. And now for the single
worst part of sewing ever, the incontestable bane of my existence, the most agonising punishment I wouldn't wish upon mine
worst enemy: closures. I don't know why I detest
sewing in closures so hard but ok confession time: 99% of the things I make pin shut one because I actually like
things to be adjustable and that actually isn't
historically inaccurate but two because I severely cannot be bothered to sew in closures any time ever. Think you've seen me sew
closures into things in the past? Think again, my friend,
the internet is lies and it only takes two seconds
to get a two-second clip of what it would hypothetically look like to sew in a
closure into a skirt. Not that I've done that. But if there's any time good to practice good respectable behaviour,
it is most certainly during a global plague in which none of us have actually bothered to
get dressed for two months, so the least we can do is give ourselves the illusion of respectability by sewing some hooks and
eyes into our petticoats. Ok, to be fair, at least this
thing didn't have sleeves. Oh! And guess what? Nearly two months later, friends, eyelets have finally arrived. That's right, the eyelets
I ordered to finish off the bust bodice at
the start of lockdown. Which means that, although
my lack of insertion lace means I can't finish the
petticoat during this video, I can at least finish the
bust bodice for you now. I have a sinking suspicion
that this is going to be the running theme of this project: perhaps I'll get the
insertion lace in time to finish that for the gown video, which in turn I won't be able to finish because the silk flower
suppliers who I've found to make the silk flowers to go with the shoulders of the gown is currently also in lockdown! Hurrah! Anyway, with the unexpected
completion of the bust bodice and good-enough completion
of the petticoat, herein we have the final result. I weirdly had a lot of
fun with this project, I tend to find Victorian
underwear projects supremely enjoyable in general. Then again, who doesn't enjoy
projects that include fine, delicate hand work with
pretty, lacy materials? Admittedly, of all the
projects I completed last year, I have to say that the combinations were probably my favourite; and while this petticoat
didn't take the entire month and a quarter of work that
those took to complete, it was still an enjoyable
process nonetheless. I'm so glad I ended up
having the bit of extra time to make this petticoat, which I'm sure will make
a significant difference in recreating the 1890s
skirt shape I'm after for the final gown; had the ball gone on as scheduled in May, I definitely would not have
had time to finish this, so, uh, silk taffeta linings to
plaguey situations, I guess? Anyway, stay tuned next month for the final installment in this series, in which I shall be constructing
the ball gown itself. Until then, anon, friends! (happy music)
