A Lacy Edwardian Skirt (Made with Edwardian Sewing Methods)

On occasion, one is in need of a very fluffy Edwardian skirt to wear on idyllic summer outings. Or one needs a skirt to make up one half of the 1910-appropriate Mary Poppins Jolly Holiday dress, one is endeavoring to reconstruct despite being in the midst of a very large offline project with zero degrees of spare time and realizing that people probably don't want to wait until July to see the reconstruction video. So herein lies a portion of that process which, incidentally, also works as fabulous prospects for standalone First and foremost, since this dress is going to be made of plain, washable cotton, I've gone ahead and pre-washed my 10 yards of cotton voile and pressed it nice and flat. An entirely futile effort, seeing as this was just about to get shoved into a box for two months and yeeted across the ocean anyway, but effort was made. So I began by seaming two strips of this one-inch wide lace together, which will serve as the vertical strips of lace that will sit between the skirt panels. Ideally, one would employ the surfaces of a wider, naturally two-inch-width lace for this purpose, rather than going through the trouble of seaming narrower lace together. But I think I'll have just enough of my widest lace to go a few times around the hem of the skirt later, and I don't really want to use that yardage here. I've made these the length of my waist to my knees according to the design. It is at this point that I realize I should probably show you the actual design of the gown that I am trying to make, just in the event that you are catching this video having missed the first video in this series, which actually explains the entire thought process behind the design, as well as the historical research behind this. So I won't be adding too much into that in this video. If you are curious, you can go and watch the first video. So that you know what I'm talking about when I start talking about design things, this is what I'm trying to go for for the skirt here. The entirety of this project is a reinterpretation of what Mary Poppins' Jolly Holiday dress would have looked like in actual 1910. This portion of the series is only focused on the skirt, so there are certain little adaptations here which I don't have historical evidence for, such as these little bows, which will not be part of this video, but there will be not the next video in the series, which will be the bodice, but the finale video in the series, which will be making all of these historically constructed components into the Mary Poppins historically accurate dress of your dreams. So here is roughly what we are trying to go for for the skirt. It is roughly constructed similarly to the walking skirts. It's a very standard skirt construction method at this turn of the century period to have these gored, flared skirt panels and a little bit of gathering just at the back, and that's what I'm planning to do for this gown as well. So up until about the knee, this looks to be about roughly knee length, is going to be these vertical cotton panels, which will be interspersed with vertical strips of lace. And then once we get to the below the knee half of the skirt is where we start to get into the more horizontal detail. So we've got insertion lace, we've got rows of pin tucking to go in the gaps of fabric between the lace insertion, because I feel like this space will need a little bit of visual interest. And then at the bottom, I've just got a little ruffle with a little lace edging at the hem. This should all be pretty straightforward, pretty self-explanatory, time-consuming because there is so many yards of fabric, especially down at the bottom of the hem where the skirt panels start to flare out. One of the most beautiful and iconic aspects of skirts like these, especially these lightweight lingerie dresses as they're called, is the movement. They're worn over petticoats because they are quite sheer, so you just get this fabulously fluffy effect. And because the skirts are cut in gores, there is a lot of room at the hem, and that room at the hem combined with layers of such lightweight material makes for the most frothy, floofy, wonderful skirts. And I'm so excited to see this in real life. So the more fabric we can get in the width of the hem here, the circumference I guess, the better this is going to be. I'm going to recycle the pattern I drafted from the 1895 keystone guide for the walking skirt project, since it's the same simple paneled skirt with some gathering at the back. But I'm just going to cut it a bit shorter where the panels stop around the knees. Okay, for a hot second I was like, why is the length on this skirt so short? What on earth did I do when I was drafting this? But then I remembered I actually ended up cutting off the bottom length to get the facing pieces. But I'm only going to cut that top upper length out of the cotton. I'm not going to bother cutting the full skirt and then cutting off the bottom bits to add ruffles and stuff. So looking at some of the reference photos to get an idea of proportionally where on the body the skirt upper bit is finishing and the bottom excitement is beginning, I'm only going to measure down that length from the waistband down to the hem of the skirt, and I'm doing that all the way around. The thing with this walking skirt is that there is a lot of back gathering, so the upper waist bit is not my waist measurement, but the back of it gets gathered in very finely. And that is a detail that is apparent on some of the lingerie dresses that I've seen, so I'm going to keep that, partly because it's already on the pattern, I already have it, but also because I just really love that style. It gives a really lovely flare to the skirt, so I think I'm going to try and give that a go. So these are the lace strips that I stitched together already to go into the side seams of the upper skirt bit. These I did measure and I did estimate a little bit longer than they should be, but what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and I'm just going to cut these panels to this length, even though I know it's a bit long, but it will give me a little bit of working room and seam allowance, you know, because that's, I guess, important too. I have five of these. I was intending one to go center front, two at the side front seams, and then one at the side seam. So there is no side seam on this skirt pattern. This is actually like in the back, this seam here, because this is roughly the waist width. So what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to cut this panel, there will be a lace insert there, cut this panel, lace insert there, and then I may cut this panel, and then I may do the like proper insertion lace technique, which is not stitching it to one side and stitching it to the other side, but having a full panel of fabric basting the lace on top of the material and then cutting it underneath. That's another insertion lace technique. Sew up that dart, lay the lace over here, and basically just create a false seam right there. I'm going to go ahead and just mark and probably fold this pattern up at the bottom width of this lace bit here so that I know where to cut my fabric. I did not, in fact, end up layering the lace strip over that side back dart, but over the dart marked on the front panel. You'll see. Basically, don't listen to what I'm saying here regarding the lace placement, because that did change slightly. I'm making sure to do that thing that Victorian paneled skirts do where the front-facing length of each panel is cut on the straight grain. That way, when matched up, the bias edge of the back-facing edge of the panel in front will be connected and stabilized with the straight grain forward-facing edge on the next panel, and the skirt won't stretch out at the seams. This works out everywhere except, of course, at the center back seam, which will inevitably be cut on the bias at both edges. With all the skirt panels cut out, I'm first just going to get the darts in the center front and side pieces pinned and stitched into place. The front panels are all going to be connected with insertion lace, but since the back panels are all getting gathered up, they won't really be seen, and I'm just French-seaming these together, starting with the center back seam, which I mentioned was the only seam to be left with two bias edges, because this one will need to be hung up for a few days. So this center back seam is the only seam that is on a bias grain. All the other ones are one bias with one straight grain, which means that they are more stable, because if the threads of the fabric are going straight up and down, then it's not going to go anywhere, but if they are going side to side, they are prone to stretching. So what I'm going to do is, people who sew already know this, but I'm just hanging this up for the next couple of days just so that this can relax into its full bias-y glory. This will, well, we can already see, will require some leveling, but that will be good to know in advance so that we can cut that off so that we don't end up with an uneven hemline. This will be especially important for this gown because we've got those horizontal rows going across the hem. We don't want them to go horizontal and then droop down. This is going to hang for probably the next two, three days-ish, depending on how long it takes me to do the insertion lace in the skirt, and I may get a start on the sleeves, because I will probably finish that by tomorrow. As aforementioned, the center front and side front seams are getting attached with insertion lace between, and because this is extremely tedious, I've decided to try these on the hand-turned instead of the treadle, since the treadle is definitely much faster for longer seams, but I have much more needle control with the hand-turned machine, which makes it a little bit more ideal for the task of following this edge with a literal one millimeter margin of error. So I've just done a little bit of experimenting, and because these vertical skirt inserts are quite long, I had budgeted like three days to do this by hand, but I just thought, you know what, if there is one instance in which we would put insertion lace in by machine, it would probably be this instance. So I did this on the hand-turned machine, by the way, because I did not think that this would go over well on the treadle, but this is some really precise work that you have to do here to get the edges to just barely sit on the cotton without falling off the edge there, and I just feel like with the momentum you have to get to keep the treadle going, that that was just not going to happen very easily. So I gave this a go on the hand-turned machine. I think it actually turned out well enough, and it took, you know, a fraction of the time that it would have taken to do by hand, so we may actually do the rest of these little machine bits and get this all done today. I've used two different methods of insertion lace here, the one where a strip of lace is stitched directly to the panel edges to form a gap in the seam, and the other one where the lace is laid on top of a solid panel of fabric and then cut away after stitching. More on this, of course, in the aforementioned lace insertion video. Okay, what, pray tell, was the point of drawing this entire gown when I'm just going to change the design of the entire thing? But such is the beauty of working with insertion lace, because I came across another skirt design that had the most beautiful chevron configuration going on at the hem, and I low-key want to do that for this gown as well. It's not too terribly far off from what I was originally planning to do, and it still has that sort of up and down that I was initially going for to make the bows on the skirt make sense. This is, first of all, too long. I want this to cut off just about at the knee here. I have been procrastinating this stage of the process purely because I don't yet have a dress form, which means that leveling hems is not something that's very easily going to be able to happen, but we are going to give it our best shot. The hem is pretty level, I think. Don't judge what's going on in the back because it's not gathered yet. It's actually not too bad, it just needs a little bit of evening up where the insertion lace is going. Anyway, I'm gonna do a little bit of playing around this morning just to try and figure out how this is going to work. The gown that I was looking at in the magazine image does not have frill, it just has a little pintuck bit of cotton at the bottom. I'm not sure. Part of me is kind of hyped at the idea of doing a frill just because I feel like with that peak chevron thing, having a nice little peaked frill coming out the bottom is going to be really cool. Also unnecessarily complicated, but you know what, that's something to be decided later. Right now, let's work on putting in some insertion lace chevrons. Okay, I think I have worked out how I'm going to do this zigzaggy stuff just based on what I've done here. Okay, so it turns out that these center panel lace placements that I placed on either side of the center front panel are not actually even from here to here and from here to here. So I've had to do a little bit of cheating with the layout here, but I have taken the median of the height, length, all that sort of configuration, and figured out what I'm going to do for the rest of the skirt that does not have these guide lines. So it turns out I can actually get away with not having to level the hem on this because I can just measure down from the waist, which is perfect. So as long as I'm making sure that all of my peaks are 18 and a quarter inches down from the waist and all of the lower peaks are down 23 and a half inches from the waist, these lengths are 10 inches and these points, I guess, are eight inches apart, then I should come out with a fairly even pattern here. So once I've got all that pinned into place, what I will then do is I will just go through and stitch down the top edge here so that I could trim back, basically trim all of this away, fold that seam allowance in, and stitch that up. And basically I will just be left with a dagged hem at the skirt. What I will then do is I will lay my original skirt pattern pieces underneath this and sort of mark where I need the additional length. And I'm not going to bother trying to cut out triangular pieces and stitch them all together. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to just mark the top point here. So I will need to cut fabric for all the space from here below on the skirt panel, seam all those together, and then basically do the same thing where I will just line up those panels underneath this, pin this edge into place, stitch that down, trim the top edge away, stitch that seam allowance back, and then I will basically end up with this bit of insertion lace connecting the top skirt to the bottom frills without having to worry about, because the the danger in cutting out skirt panels like this is that this is a lot of bias edge and this is a lot of potential for the skirt to, as I'm stitching it down, to stretch. And then I will end up with bubbling and warping all up in this area and I don't want to deal with that. And then once I have that, this whole bottom ruffle edge of the skirt, I can go ahead and add more rows of chevron. I think that is my plan of battle. Now we just have to test and see if it works. Here is where we are on the dress progress so far. We have completed the first row of hem and we have a long way to go. So basically, maybe I was trying to describe this earlier, I don't remember, this dress has taken me three months at this point, but what I'm doing is I have now, I'm going through and I'm laying all of the pattern pieces under this dress that I get the full length of the original pattern skirt and I know how long this is supposed to be. My plan for this is to just mark on the pattern how high up basically I need to go so that I'm not cutting entirely new skirt pieces because my goal here is to get the fabric that goes from here to here and of course I need the flared shape, how far out it needs to flare, and then the length of it. So I'm basically just going to be cutting new pattern pieces which is basically just the bottom like third of the skirt and then from there I will go ahead and do my insertion lace techniques to insert the other rows of the chevron. Sadly, I do not have enough of this to do three more, well two more layers of this as I had hoped to do. However, I do have enough of this lace which is not my favorite. As I've been putting the skirt together, I've realized next to this lace, this lace just looks so modern. Too late for that, but I'm going to nevertheless make that lace make a little bit more sense by doing a little center row of this lace going all the way around and then this one on the bottom. As has been the process for this entire gown, it's kind of turned out to be no matter how hard I try and pre-plan and design this dress, it's kind of a step-by-step process. I'm kind of making it up and making changes as I go along based on what looks nice and what additional labor I feel like putting into this gown. So more to come. The outcome of this dress is going to be just as much a surprise to me as it will be to you, except you have a scrub forward button and I kind of don't. That, ladies and gentlefolk, is all of the lace that I have left. I was so nervous that I wasn't going to have enough to go all the way around. I did measure, so it was okay. But it's still nerve-wracking when you actually get to doing it. Everything is all pinned into place. We are now ready to go ahead and stitch this down. Now, this first row up here I did by hand and that took about two days of labor to do this first initial stitch as well as the seam allowance stitch, which if you saw the lace insertion video, you probably know what I'm talking about. Would ideally like to try and do the rest of this by machine because 10 days of hand sewing labor on this, which I would rather have this video not come out in July. I'm so nervous about the machine just being a little bit too rough with it and just ever so slightly stretching it out of place and puckering it. I don't know. If it is not absolutely appalling, if it is nothing that we can't reset with steam and an iron, then we're gonna go ahead and do it because that will shave off days, weeks from this skirt process. If we try it and it's just absolutely unsightly, then we're just gonna go ahead and do it because you gotta do what you gotta do. Okay, I think we can live with this. It actually surprisingly, not surprisingly, wasn't at all difficult to do this by machine. I can actually go slow enough with this, still maintain the forward motion, and also make sure I stay on track with the edge of the lace. It was not as bad as I thought it would be, of course, as things generally tend to be. This is particularly an antique machine problem because this does not have a backstitch. The material is prone to sort of gathering up on itself as you stitch. You kind of need to smooth that out after you pull the fabric from the machine. These loose threads can get pulled underneath, knotted off by hand. It's definitely going to take a lot more time than this would on a modern electric, domestic, or industrial machine because obviously I'm working with the antique restrictions that I have here. However, it's definitely going to be a lot faster than doing it by hand. One thing I am truly embracing with this project is the raw edge. Raw edges are evident on a lot of surviving historical garments, and there were certainly no shortage of them on the lingerie dresses I studied for this project. The simple logic is that with the amount of lace and seams in a gown like this, ain't nobody got time to then go finishing off all those edges. And in any case, finished seams would only add visible bulk beneath transparent lace areas. So the long cotton edges cut for the insertion lace are not going to be folded and finished, but just tacked back and left to exist as they are. Okay, so now that we have all of this nonsense in place, we have to go ahead and finish this skirt. First of all, we need a placket in there, which I will do. But I also need that bottom ruffle, which I have measured on myself to the floor. 18 inches should be perfectly safe, so I'm going to make it 18 inches tall. It's just going to be one straight grain strip of fabric. You'll see. I'm going to add, okay, so I want this to be really floofy. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take just the measurement from this point here to this point here. See what that distance is. Triple that so that I have a nice, super, super long strip of fabric that I can just gather in. So slight change of plan. As it turns out, I don't even have enough fabric to do double width, let alone triple width. And of course I bought this fabric from the New York City Garment District, which I cannot exactly get on a plane to get more of right now. My plan of battle, and this may be a little bit tricky, but piecing is period. So I can get two rows of frill out of one with the fabric. There's not quite enough to get a third, but there is about 12 inches left over, which is mildly annoying, but also not because I'm going to cut the lengths out of this. That way I can use, because this fabric has got a really nice selvedge on it. It's very, I mean, it is a plain woven selvedge. It's not the fringy bit. So I can actually use this as the hem, which will save me a ton of time. This technique was not preferred by the late 19th century. They do by this point start cutting off their selvedges. However, the use of selvedge is present throughout many, many previous centuries of history. So it's not like this would never have been done. Like if you've got a good selvedge and you don't feel like hemming six yards of material, you're probably going to do that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut the 18 inch frill strip from this end of the fabric. And then from that end of the fabric, I'm going to be left with about 12 inches in the middle throughout the entire remaining length. And I think the remaining length of this is about three yards. See, the ridiculous thing is I bought 10 yards of this material thinking, oh, that will be plenty. That's way more than enough. Um, it's not. It turns out these lingerie dresses require a heck ton of material. So just be warned if you are planning to get into this and are planning to get into the level of pintuck frillage that I ended up getting into with this gown. I'm not sure it's even going to be 12 inches. It's more like eight. I don't know. Whatever it was, it looked quite short. This is about 20 inches shorter than even a double width. So what I think I'm going to do is I'm going to cut the full double width for the front panel and the side panel. And I'm going to just take the remaining inches off of the back panel because that back panel is getting gathered up into the center back anyway. And so the back of the gown is going to be quite heavy to begin with. And I think we can sacrifice a little bit of the frill gathers on the back of the skirt anyway. I think this will all work out okay, but let's see how this goes. Once I had cut my panels and connected them all with French seams to form a continuous circle of frill panel, I then went and stitched some of this edging lace along what will become the hem edge, and which is the edge I cut along the selvedge. This use of selvedge saved me a ton of hemming, and the little lace edging will distract from the obvious selvedgeness of the hem. On the other edge, which is cut raw, I'm just running a straight stitch all the way around and about one quarter inch from the edge, and that I'll use as the gathering thread later. This thread is starting and stopping according to each panel rather than continuously traveling all the way around the frill, so that just in case the thread snaps, which it actually might because about halfway through stitching this I realized that I was doing so with cotton thread, which is much weaker than strong silk thread, I won't have to re-stitch the entire circumference. The threads were fine by the way, no breaking occurred, but it's a good strategy to employ just in case. So I endeavored to do my initial plan of gathering up that entire panel and then pinning it to the chevron bit down there. As I had feared, I just don't have enough fabric to make it look intentional. It just kind of looked like a sad little, is there too much ease in this panel, or is this supposed to be gathered, you can't really tell sort of situation. I'm trying something else. This could be a very terrible idea, and I don't know how this is going to turn out, but I've moved all of the excess to here. This is the peak of the chevron, and I think what I'm going to try and do is just do the gathering. Every time the chevron goes up, there will be a little bunch of fabric that will just come out and do its little floofy thing. This could look really stupid, I don't know. I'm going to just do a little bit of pinning, and then I'll flip this right side out and see if it actually looks stupid, or if it's relatively passable. This is not something that I have historical evidence for in my sources that I have seen, particularly. I have seen bottom frills, but again, the bottom frills involve a lot more fabric that I'm currently working with. Lack of fabric is a very historically accurate problem, so I'm trying to solve this. So let's see what this does. It did not, in fact, look entirely stupid, so I decided to go ahead with it, gently stroking the gathers so that they sat relatively evenly in their little niches. The frill is then stitched on along that bottom lace chevron to complete the length of the skirt. Just some little finishing tasks left in the form of making up a little placket to sit along the edge of the center back opening, which is done by stitching along the bottom and side edge of two sandwiched eight-inch strips of cotton, turning and pressing, and then stitching the raw side of one cotton layer to the raw edge opening of the skirt. The other placket layer will have its edge folded under and felled down to the seam allowance to conceal all of the raw edges along that opening edge. And thus, with the raw waistband edge temporarily basted down and a temporary closure in place purely for reveal purposes, the first half of this lingerie gown project is complete. I'm going to try not to get too attached to this skirt as a standalone item because, I mean, it's real swishy and I kind of just want to wear it, but rest assured that the bodice component of this gown is actually very nearly complete now that, at the time of recording this voiceover, I have now emerged from a week-long pintuck extravaganza. That will be coming at some nondescript non-time as soon as the finishing touches are complete, and I have a moment to edit the video, which may admittedly be nearer to July, but now I guess I can do that YouTuber thing where I tell you to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell so that you can be the first to be notified every time I upload a new sewing video. Anyway, I severely apologize for that. Okay, bye. One of the great tragedies of the human experience is the inability to read books and sew things, or drive cars, or clean your house, or go on walks, safely, whilst reading books. 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