Guest HOW-TO: Petticoats and Crinolines and Slips, Oh My!

[pattern from Lanetz Living]

La BellaDonna left a really helpful comment about slips and crinolines and petticoats on the Shirtwaist #2 post the other day, and on the off-chance some of you missed it, I thought I should elevate it to Full Post Status. (You should really read the comments if you can, they're always awesome, because you all rock!)

So, LBD writes:

For the ladies who are dubious about wearing a complete crinoline under their full skirts, I would point out there is an Easy Cheat™:

Use the skirt part of the pattern you're making up to draft a petticoat. It's not as scary as "draft" makes it sound: just make sure the finished "petticoat" is a couple of inches shorter than the finished dress will be, and experiment with putting ruffles on the "petticoat" until you reach your desired degree of "pouf." You don't even have to make yourself crazy with shortening the petticoat and then sewing the ruffle onto the hem; just topstitch the ruffle onto the finished "petticoat" so that the bottom of the ruffle is even with the "petticoat" hem. If you want more fullness higher up, put another ruffle higher up on the "petticoat;" it should overlap the lower ruffle, but not cover it completely. For a gathered skirt pattern being made into a petticoat, you can make a casing and run the elastic through at the waist; for a gored skirt, or something fitted, you can put in a placket and a hook and eye (or just overlap it a bit and put on the hook and eye!). Let the petticoat sit a little BELOW the waist of your skirt, to cut down on bulk at your waistline (this means the petticoat skirt waist will actually be BIGGER than the waist of the dress, so that the petticoat sits lower down on your torso than the dress waist does.) You can experiment with making ruffles out of the "petticoat" fabric; you can try ruffling up some good stiff nylon net (about 7-9" wide for a good finished ruffle), in which case you WILL want that petticoat fabric between you and the nylon of the ruffle; maybe another layer of fabric over that, to protect the skirt from the nylon. Dubious about nylon? Stitch a band of horsehair (woven nylon strip, made from nylon horses, designed to Stiffen Stuff) behind the hem of the ruffle. Horsehair is washable and is easy to work with; just top stitch it on the underside of the ruffle. If the dress fabric is lightweight, and you have enough, you could even make one ruffle out of the dress fabric! For instance, a yellow print dress might have a plain yellow "petticoat," with: a plain yellow ruffle; or a nylon net ruffle; or a white eyelet ruffle; or a lace ruffle; or a yellow print ruffle. Or all of them, if you want a Really Full Petticoat (with a Really Mixed Look). A print corduroy dress might have the petticoat in one color of the print, and the edge of the ruffle could be bound in the corduroy. (You might want to bind it using corduroy cut on the weft, since corduroy cut on the bias can get weird.) (N.B.: A Really Full Ruffle is generally considered to be the finished width times 3; if your skirt hem is 100 inches, that means a 300-inch strip of fabric gathered back down to 100 inches. A ruffle two and a half times the finished width, or 250 inches, is OK for a not-too-full ruffle that's been backed with horsehair. But I'd recommend the Three Times suggestion. My own preference for a finished ruffle length is 7-9"; your mileage, and your height, may vary. But it's a size to start with. And I completely agree with the zigzag-over-dental floss-or-buttonhole thread-method of gathering chunks of fabric. Mark your ruffle in quarters (that is, half-way, and half-way again) BEFORE gathering; mark your "petticoat" in quarters; match up the quarters to make sure you haven't gathered too much petticoat ruffle in one spot and not another. Don't take out the gathering thread! Leave it in! Topstitch the ruffle on a couple of times so it's nice and secure. DO remember to preshrink your petticoat fabric!!

Remember: YOU'RE IN CHARGE. You can do it ANY WAY YOU WANT. Red silk taffeta petticoat with black lace ruffles? Check. Plaid flannel petticoat with eyelet ruffles? Check. Pink gingham petticoat with dotted swiss ruffles? Check. It is a GREAT way to use up some of those weird chunks of fabric that find their way into every stash. Nobody needs to know that you have a gold damask petticoat under that grey wool shirtdress. On the other hand, how cool if you do?

The Dress A Day Guide to Learning To Sew: Part One

pincushion from Dottyral on Etsy

I get a lot of email asking me how to learn to sew, and with so many other things in life, the answer is "It Depends."

First of all, you have to know how you learn. Are you someone who likes the "monkey-see, monkey-do" approach? Then you probably want to learn from a person, instead of a book. Do you want to learn in a big group where you can hide in the back, or do you need one-on-one attention? Do you do better with a kindly-grandma type who's never met a zipper she couldn't fix, or do you want a hip young thing wearing a deconstructed t-shirt? If you are going to learn from a family member or friend, will your relationship survive the first buttonhole? (Be honest with yourself. If a family dinner with Aunt Biddy has you gritting your teeth and wishing for death, she is NOT the person to teach you how to sew.)

If your fingers itch at the thought of not being able to just jump in yourself and TRY things, maybe you should learn from a book. I really like the Reader's
Digest Complete Guide to Sewing, because it has great pictures and is very matter-of-fact; other people swear by the Singer Sewing Essentials book or the Vogue Sewing Book, among other titles. I recommend that, if you go the book route, you buy at least two books (or as many as you can afford the money and space for) so that you can get second opinions if something doesn't work for you. (Remember, sewing is like perl: There's More Than One Way To Do It.)

Then there's the question of What Do You Sew First? Again, how do you work? Will you do better with the challenge of a complicated first project (because you really, really want the result)? Or will you be happy making a basic tote bag or placemat that you wouldn't otherwise want or use, just to learn techniques slowly? Will you not be motivated unless you're sewing beautiful fabric, or will it rip you up inside if you ruin something special?

And another thing: how do you deal with frustration and failure? Because learning to sew, at least at first, will add heaping doses of both into your life, I'm sorry to say. If frustration makes you crazy-angry, with bouts of throwing things and/or screaming, try to sew when your family/roommate/pet parakeets are elsewhere. Take lots of deep breaths. One deep breath for each stitch ripped out is a pretty good ratio.

If "failing" at something makes you want to sleep for a week (and either stop eating altogether or mainline Ben & Jerry's): redefine 'failure'. You didn't fail to make a skirt, you succeeded in learning how NOT to make a skirt! Go into every project, at least for the first few projects, with the goal of learning, and not with the goal of making something couture-level. Define success generously. If you got the machine threaded right, didn't sew through your finger, and the two pieces of fabric join up more or less evenly? You won. Do a victory lap.

More advice: isolate your variables. Don't try everything at once! In other words, don't try to change a pattern's size or design AND do a new technique you've never tried before AND use a difficult fabric: if something goes wrong you will find it hard to figure out just what to blame (except for sunspots: I find it convenient to blame sunspots for everything).

I still think the ideal first project is a full skirt; it gives you only one part of your body to fit (your waist), encourages you to jump right in to zippers (Zippers: not that hard. Take some deep breaths, go slowly, and baste; you'll be fine), and, truly, a full skirt is also forgiving of minor "mistakes". Waistband uneven? Don't tuck in your shirt! Your hem is wobbly? Walk fast, they'll never notice.

Lastly, here are some things I wish I'd known when I first learned to sew ... and that I wish I followed 100% now!

• Cutting is five times as important as construction. Honestly. Once you've cut the pattern, your track is chosen. It's much harder to recover from a cutting error than a sewing error. If you take your time on the cutting out, you will never regret it. Don't cut out patterns when you're tired, angry, or distracted (or, needless to say, drunk); you'll never wear the dress. And all those markings on the patterns? MARK THEM ALL. You won't be able to 'figure it out later' -- believe me, I KNOW.


• Have everything in place before you start sewing. And by everything, I mean, wind one more bobbin than you think you'll need, know where your seam ripper, measuring tape, pins, zipper foot for your machine, etc., are. If the project needs seam binding or buttons or a zipper or interfacing: have it before you start. The fabric store is a sad, sad place at ten p.m. (if it's even open). And once you get home with whatever it was you needed, sitting down with a book will look awfully inviting. (Of course, being by nature impatient and NOT having what you need can lead to some "interesting" design decisions ... not that I would know. Ha.)


• Put your stuff away in the right place when you're done. That way you won't have to spend an hour cleaning up from your LAST project before you can start your NEXT project. Total buzzkill, that is.


• Eliminate the "shouldas" from your sewing life. Has a project descended into that abyss from which it shall never emerge? Write. It. Off. Don't let it hang around your sewing room like some Dickensian ghost. Give it away, cut it into quilt squares, mash it up for papermaking, hold an unfinished-object-swap with all your sewing friends, heck, throw it out or burn it if you have to -- I don't care what you do with it, but once you get to the point where thinking of it makes you feel guilty and self-flagellating, it is not a "unfinished project" but a curséd albatross. Sewing is no longer something people need to do to survive on the frontier [if you ARE on the frontier, pls ignore this part]; it's a FUN HOBBY. Vigorously expunge the parts that aren't fun. So you screwed up. So what? Bury the evidence, deny, deny, deny, and move ON.

I called this "Part One" as I may (or may not, you never know) add other parts later. But don't wait for them! Start now!

Wiki How-To and Contest!

So, while I wasn't really paying attention, you all have added nearly SEVEN HUNDRED patterns to the Vintage Sewing Patterns Wiki! That is, frankly, awesome.

Even more awesome is that Janet at Lanetz Living has offered a $100 gift certificate for a wiki contest! (UPDATE: Rita at Cemetarian has offered a $50 gift certificate for 2nd place!)

So here's how the wiki contest is going to work -- I'd love to get EVEN MORE PATTERNS into the wiki, because the bigger it is, the more useful it will be. So let's aim for 3000 patterns by midnight, Central Time, Jan 1, 2008. If we hit that goal, I'll select ONE pattern page randomly from all those created and reward the creator with that spiffy Lanetz Living gift certificate!

Obviously, the more patterns you upload, the greater your chances of winning ...

Quite a few people have emailed me, saying that they have a lot of patterns they'd like to add to the wiki, but they don't know how and they're worried about messing things up. To which I say: it's a wiki! Don't worry too much about messing things up. Wikis are both fluid and resilient; anything you "break" can be fixed in a matter of moments. But if you're still worried (or if you're not a "let's go in and mess around and see what happens" kind of person), here's a little quick how-to on adding pages and patterns to the wiki.

The first thing you should do, if at all possible, is log in. (It's okay to edit anonymously, but for practical reasons, I can't award the prize to Anonymous. You're in it for purely altruistic reasons if you edit anonymously.)

After you login in, create a page! A page starts with a pattern, and a pattern starts with a number. To start a new page for a new pattern, use this box:



This is the box on the Home page, on the lower left. If you use this box, then the page headers/dividers (Links to reviews/blog posts, Sources/Vendors, Gallery, and Wishlist) will show up on the page automatically.

Type your pattern name and number (e.g., Vogue 5380) into the box. That will start a new page called "Vogue 5380". If there is ANOTHER pattern already entered that has the same manufacturer and number, and yours is different, call it "Vogue 5380 A" (B, C, etc.).

Don't put extra information into the page name, like a date or a description. Just the pattern maker and number. Some early patterns didn't list makers, so you can just use a number (or call them Newspaper Pattern).

Now your new page should open! Then you can add an image. Look for the link that says "Insert Image". If you don't see the link, you're probably not logged in. Only logged-in users can upload an image. On my page it looks like this:



Clicking this will give you a "Browse" box -- find the pattern image on your computer and click on it. Then upload it.

You will then get an option box to choose whether to upload a thumbnail (small) image, or a full-size. Unless your image is HUGE, off the screen huge, please upload the full-size. Caption it with the pattern name and number:




Your page should reload and you'll see these tags inserted on the page for the pattern image:

[[Image:Vogue5380.jpg|Vogue 5380]]

If you are linking to a page on your blog or your site, you can paste that link in under the "= Links to reviews/blog posts =" or "= Sources/Vendors =" lines. (If you are so inclined, you can link to any page where I've written about a pattern -- to find it, Google ["Pattern Number" site:dressaday.com], which should turn up any pages on my site where that pattern is referenced.)

Now you're nearly done! All that's left is to add any notes or categories. If you feel like typing in the notes from the pattern ("Simplicity Pattern 1732 ... This includes; 3 variations of this smart slim skirt. View 1 has high rise, shaped waistline and suspenders. View 2 boasts top-stitching and tab detailed pleat at left front. View 3 features a back kick pleat and tab trim at hipline.") go ahead!

You can also add categories: Some good ones for any pattern include the pattern manufacturer (Vogue), the year or decade if known (1950s, 1954), what kind of garment it is (dresses, jackets), any design features (pockets, collars), etc. Remember that the point of categories is to make "buckets" to sort patterns with. So if you'd like to be able to see a list of all patterns in the wiki that have french cuffs, you have to TAG all the patterns in the wiki that have french cuffs! [Not all categories are worthwhile: some bad categories would be "date of upload" (because it's in the history of the page), your name (ditto), "I like this" (not a useful category for OTHER people), etc.]

Then just hit SAVE and you're done! You made a pattern page! Right now uploading a new pattern takes me about three minutes. Depending on your internet connection, size of your pattern image files, and how many other people are uploading, you might take a teeny bit longer.

You might be asking "I'd love to help, but I don't really have a lot of pattern images ... what can I do?" Lots! You can add categories, you can 'tidy' pages that don't have the right headers, and you can visit the list of sellers on the home page and upload their images! (If you do that, download the images to your hard drive first -- otherwise you can't find them when you Browse -- and be sure to link the seller's page to the wiki page.)

Go upload patterns, have fun, and figure out how you're going to spend that $100 at Lanetz Living. I'm not eligible to win, of course, but if I were, I'd probably start with this one (the one on the left)!

HOW TO: make a three-panel skirt have pockets

Okay, I've been putting off doing a HOWTO here because, frankly, I'm not really a great seamstress. I've never taken a formal class, and every time I read an issue of Threads I say to myself "Huh! That *would* be a better way to do that." But I figured I'd post this one, for a couple reasons. First of all, even though I'm not that great at it (nothing like Summerset, for one, or Rostitchery, for another!) I really do enjoy sewing, and so at least I can reassure people than even if you aren't couture-caliber you can make stuff that fits and have fun doing it. Secondly, I figured if I post this people will tell me what I did wrong, and that way next time I can do it faster/better/more attractively. And finally, I just HATE PATTERNS THAT DON'T HAVE POCKETS. So by posting this I can rescue one more pattern from the evils of pocketlessness.

Anyway. There it is.

So, what will you need to do this project?

• a sewing machine


• an iron and ironing board


• flat space to work


• scissors, tape measure, ruler, pencil or marking implement, etc. etc.


• Diet Coke or similar beverage


• music with a good beat but off-kilter or oddly nihilistic lyrics (I like Soul Coughing, They Might Be Giants, Magnetic Fields, etc.)


• fabric (about two yards of 45" wide for the pattern shown here, 1 3/4 yards if it's 60" wide)
  


• a suitable pattern (see below)

(Okay, okay, OKAY. I know that pattern has gauchos. Ignore them. Pretend they aren't there. It's okay, we won't even be TOUCHING those pieces. Don't worry. Would I lead you into gauchos? I would not. You can trust me.)

Now, pretty much any skirt pattern with a center panel and two side panels will work for this project. I chose this Simplicity pattern because 1) I like contour waistbands and 2) it was $1 at JoAnn's on Saturday, so I could buy two. Why two? Because I'm lazy, and part of this project involves doubling a pattern piece. This way I could just use another part from the second pattern, and not have to trace it. $1 is cheap for not having to trace!

For this project I decided to use view B of this pattern, which is the blue skirt in the illustration. A, B, and C are basically the same, just differing lengths. The first thing I had to figure out is what size to make, so I could pull those pattern pieces and put them aside.

Now, I have a small waist in proportion to my hips (or a big butt in proportion to my waist, calling Sir Mix-A-Lot) so I checked those measurements, and sure enough, the size that was right in the hips would be too big in the waist. (Also, this pattern is made to be worn 1" below the waist, which I Don't Do.)

Now, I've made a lot of Simplicity skirts lately, including another one with a yoke, and so I grabbed the yoke pattern I knew fit me and laid it over the yoke pattern for this skirt. That confirmed for me that I needed a size 12 waistband but a size 14 skirt. What to do?




Well, I took the pieces for the size 12 waistband and cut them on the 12 line at the top edge, but at the 14 at the bottom edge, fudging between them at the sides, so that it would fit at the waist but still be able to be attached to the size 14 skirt. Then I cut out the rest of the pattern pieces from the pattern sheets, making sure to have *two* side front pieces, one from one pattern and one from the other.

That done, the next thing I had to do was to get rid of the pleats in that side front piece, cute as they are, because I thought they would interfere with putting in pockets. Now, I looked to hell and gone all over the Internet for the "right" way to do this, but I couldn't find any instructions, so this is just my usual half-assery: I took the pattern pieces and taped the pleats shut, tapering all the way down to the edge.

But this made me worry that taking that pleat out would make the hips too narrow, so I decided to measure the hips just to make sure. To do this, I put the pattern pieces together, overlapping the seam allowances, and marked where my hip is (about 9" below my waist, you can see a black mark on the center front piece where I measured this). Then I measured across to make sure there would be enough room for my hips (whew! there was).




That done, it was time to figure out where to place the pocket on the side front piece. I held up the pattern to myself, making sure to place the top of it lower than the waist (because the pattern has a waistband). Then I let my hand fall to where I would want a pocket, and marked that.

Then I cut three of the side front piece, out of a scrap I had lying around:



Why three? Because the pocket in the panel has three parts. There's the part of the skirt above the pocket opening (which also includes the 'back' of the pocket), the part of the skirt below the pocket opening, and the part, not visible, that is the 'inside' of the pocket (which is like a facing on the part of the skirt below the pocket opening).

So I took these three pieces and laid them out. Unfortunately, none of these pictures turned out, and OF COURSE it's the most difficult part of making this. Ugh.

Anyway here are the three pattern pieces you end up with (the skirt, the top and underpocket, and the pocket facing). I cut the facing out of a piece of pattern tissue that I had lying around (literally, it was on the floor). You can use any kind of paper. Do write which is which on the facing piece, though, it saves a lot of heartache later. I don't know how many pocket facings I've made and then thrown away by accident!




So how did I get from three of the same piece to three different pieces? Well, you're cutting the bottom off the bottommost piece of the pocket sandwich (everything below the bottom of the inside pocket seam). You're cutting the top off the topmost piece of the pocket sandwich (everything above the top edge of the pattern -- but DON'T FORGET to leave a seam allowance, or your pocket will be 5/8ths of a inch lower on your body than you expected). Then you cut the same top and bottom off the pocket facing (the middle part of the pocket sandwich) to make the pocket facing.



The darker blue is the bottommost layer, towards the top of the skirt. You can see how deep the pocket will be (the pin) and the black line shows the added seam allowance for the bottom pocket seam (yes I draw on fabric with china markers).

Here's me making sure the pocket is exactly where I want it (the floral thing there is my keychain clipped to the pocket of the skirt I'm actually wearing, as opposed to the one I'm making):



(This is from my point-of-view, e.g., leaning over and upside-down.)

I was happy with this, so then I figured I could make a "real" (that is, wearable) skirt! Yay! But I still didn't want to use great fabric, so I used a piece of lightweight denim I had hanging around. Here's the three back pieces all sewn together:



(I left the pleats in at the back.)

But the plain denim fabric seemed a little boring to me. How could I spice it up? I know! Zippers! Yellow zippers!



You see, when you make this kind of pocket, the top edge can be all wiggly and pulled out of shape, unless you reinforce it with twill tape. Zippers have built-in twill tape, and they make a nice design element.

So get a plastic separating zipper (like the kind that you use to make jackets with). Cut away the teeth of the zipper that would go in the seam allowance (about 1/2 inch on either side, as in the photo above) -- you do NOT want the sewing machine needle to hit a zipper tooth!

Of course, the picture of sewing the zipper trim on to the skirt piece didn't come out, either, but what I did was: sew the zipper to the skirt piece, teeth facing down towards the hem. Sew the pocket facing to the skirt piece, right sides together. Then turn and topstitch, like so:



When you're done, it will look like this:



Then, to assemble, you want to attach the underpocket to the pocket facing piece, like so:



I seamed the bottom (this picture is fuzzy) and then double-zigzagged the edges, because this fabric is a bit ravelly.



Then you baste the whole sandwich together. (When you're sewing over the zipper part, even though you trimmed away the teeth in the seam allowance, you probably want to hand-crank the machine. Hitting zipper teeth at speed is Not Fun.)



This is what it looks like when you're done:



See how the stitching down the side is within the seam allowance? I used to baste at the seamline and then had to pick out the bits that showed. I'm marginally smarter now.

Then you do it all again for the other side. Here's the front assembled:



NOTE: Do not let your iron run over the plastic zipper teeth. They WILL melt!

Then you keep going and assemble the rest of the skirt. Here's the waistband going on -- why did I sew a line of stitching around the bottom of the waistband facing?



This is why -- it makes a nice guideline for turning it under!



Now, time to baste in the zipper. If I'd been thinking, I would have bought a bright yellow zipper for the side zip, too, but I wasn't thinking (and in fact the other zippers were bought more than a year ago for another project), so blue it is.



And actually, my first try at sewing in the zipper was completely crappy, but I offer it here to you to show you how bad a sewer I can be:



So I took it out and redid it (and I re-threaded the machine in blue, because no sense in drawing attention to the zipper!). But this is getting really long, so here's where we skip to the end:



The pockets aren't really uneven: I'm just standing funny. And the skirt is a bit too long; I think I'll shorten it by about two inches next time I make this. It's a bit dowdy at this length.

The whole process (not counting the time it took me to find & buy the pattern) was about three and a half hours. Two hours to do the measuring, planning, preliminary cutting, and prototyping, and one and a half hours to make up the whole skirt (including cutting out the new fabric and re-doing the side zipper). The skirt is hemmed with yellow bias tape, applied by machine.

I didn't prewash the plastic zipper I used for the pocket trim, because it is made of pure polyester. If I were going to use a vintage zipper (or an upholstery zipper) with metal teeth and a cotton tape, I definitely would have prewashed the zipper. If you had long enough zippers (or were okay with lapping them) you could have also inserted zippers into the long front seams between the panels. You could also use piping, braid, or rickrack to trim the pocket edges.

Okay, that's ONE WAY to make front pockets on a panel skirt. If you have a different way, do leave it in the comments! If I left out an important step (as I am wont to do), ask for clarification in the comments! (The plant to my right in the picture (your left) is lavender, so you don't have to ask about it in the comments, and my tights are from H&M, last year. Everything else, ask about it in the comments!)