23 May 2021

Finished, and worn on several occasions. It’s just a pity I didn’t finish it five months ago, when I really needed it - on the other hand, it has been a very chilly week or two!

I attached the panels through the tape to the yoke by hand, using a small running stitch, and switching to red and pink thread respectively as I came to each, and it doesn’t show at all from the right side. In the end I didn’t bother to sew along the edge of the tape parallel to the top, let alone to machine along that line, as that would have flattened the ribbing and been much more intrusive; the running stitch seems to be strong enough.

Tonight I inserted yet another dart on the buttonhole side of the waist, which now has ten darts in it and only about four inches of straight section across the front. Unbelievably, the waist still measures out at 27” on the tape measure, which makes no sense at all given that I have supposedly just taken an extra inch out of it! However, it fits well enough, and does allow me scope to tuck in blouses/vests/the gathered waists of extra petticoats underneath….

I wondered if the hem would ‘drop’ with wearing, but in fact it’s pretty much exactly the 24” originally calculated - so far, at least! This is just about an inch below the knee, and the length works nicely with my ‘office’-length skirts; it also works well enough under the ankle/calf-length ones where you really can’t see what’s going on anyway. The six-inch yoke does end up contributing extra bulk over the hips and might have been better at eight inches, but as it’s not an ankle-length petticoat I think the relative proportions of a longer yoke and shorter skirt might have looked a little odd. Anyway, it fits over the hips under a skirt, which is the important thing.

27 April 2021

I took out one of the front darts and moved it to the sole remaining space in the back (the entire rest of the waistband is now occupied by darts). On measuring the length of the yoke at the top, I somehow seem to have managed to end up with a 27” waist instead of the carefully-calculated 26”, so I may need to put it back in again….

I removed the bottom button and re-sewed it with a longer shank so that it can go through the knitted layer as well as the existing strip. And I sewed and hemmed on a woven strip of 4cm tape along the bottom of the yoke to finish the raw edge and to provide reinforcement for the stitching that will secure the knitted panels. Now all I have to do is actually to sew them on!

21 April 2021

I finally decided that the answer was to arrange the ‘yoke’ as a simple buttoned strip with no attempt at a placket, to align the ends of the strip with the ends of the knitted panels, and to rotate it so that the opening falls on the quarter-front (thus producing the desired arrangement with red panels down either side and stripes centred in the middle) instead of having a side opening. Which oddly enough is actually the location of the fastening in the drawings for the original pattern!

I arranged and sewed five beautifully-spaced buttonholes and corresponding buttons, and discovered both that the resulting strip would indeed do up, and that rotating the position of the fastening meant that all the darts had of course shifted from their carefully calcuated positions relative to the side seams, meaning that I now had a slightly unfortunate belly pouch engineered into the front of the garment! I’m not going to re-sew the whole lot, but I probably ought to take out those two prominent front darts and compensate with some more round what is now the ‘back’; I have a swayback anyway, so moving the majority of the waist shaping round to there won’t hurt.

However, it then dawned on me that my bottom buttonhole was too close to the edge of the yoke and would interfere with the upper ‘wave’ of the knitted edge that was to be attached to it! Also that I would somehow need to overlap the knitted panels across the buttoned opening along with the edge of the yoke to which they were sewn, which would mean that at least one layer would need to get buttoned through.

The best solution to this turned out to be to use the holes in the lace which were conveniently placed close to the edge of the panels, and simply have the bottom button emerging through one of those. I really need to remove it and reattach it with a longer shank to allow for the extra thickness through which it has to pass, and I still need to move those darts, but a quick trial of the (tacked and pinned to the outside of the yoke) garment proves that I can at least get it on over my hips and that it doesn’t gape too much where I had to leave the seam open at the top of the knitted panel. From that point of view, it’s a blessing that I moved it from the side to the front, where it is of course under much less strain.

The other thing that is obvious from the photos and even more so in real life is that I shall need to block out the lace towards the bottom of the skirt to match the width of the stiff picot edge; it’s not just a hobble-skirt effect, but one with a too-large hem! However, it’s actually a lot less scratchy to wear than I was expecting.

1 March 2021

Having very carefully drafted and constructed a six-inch yoke out of the top strip of an old sheet, I then realised that while I’d allowed ease for the width of my hips at the bottom of the yoke opening, I hadn’t allowed for the fact that the widest part of my hips/thighs is well below six inches from my waist, and this portion of me has to fit through the opening too before it can be fastened into place!
In fact the width at the waist is really too big currently, but the bottom of the opening is far too tight even if I extend it down to the very edge of the existing strip; I can only just squeeze in. And due to the way I’ve constructed the design as a single piece, I can’t let out the sides independently. I could squeeze a bit more out of the the opening on my right, but it would then become lopsided. And I want the side seams to align midway across the two red panels, so I can’t create a longer opening by leaving the knitted portion open as well, since the seam falls in the centre of a panel….

Probably the best thing to do is to extend the ‘placket’ down below the top of the knitted edge, so that I have a sort of zipper-tape strip projecting below the main yoke at that point, and rely on the stretch (and 40” circumference) to get the knitting over my hips when the buttons are undone. Although if the knitting is sewn down into the yoke it isn’t going to have all that much scope for stretching.

Or I could just cut a ‘steek’ down the middle of a red panel and hope there is enough fullness for the raw edges to overlap…
Looking at the original drawing, it does seem that the yoke is constructed as a simple strip with the two ends overlapping, so presumably they just arranged for the side seam to align with the edge of one of the sets of panels - which it would naturally tend to do anyway, if you started at one end of the strip and attached the panels in a row along it. Unfortunately with so few panels and with them in strongly contrasting colours, I feel that would really look rather odd if I did it, which is why I was planning to sew the top and bottom up separately and then ease the two tubes into one another with the seams differently aligned.

20 February 2021

I’ve sewn four strips together, and think I probably shan’t use the fifth after all (I could have saved myself a lot of work!)
Four strips is enough to give a forty-inch hem, in fact more like 45” now that I’ve done my best to steam the bottom half out to lie flat with the picot band, and according to my experiments with a loop of tape measure, that ought to be more than adequate stride width for a knee-length skirt. (I have to say it does seem a lot more constrictive when I wrap the actual sewn-up piece around my waist, but in theory at least it ought to be fine!)
Five strips would also contribute a lot of extra bulk at hip-height that will need to be gathered into the waistband. The main problem may be if a four-strip width turns out to be too tight to sit in - I’m afraid it’s very likely to get ‘seated’ in any case.

Another compelling argument for only doing four strips instead of five is to get the colours to alternate! I’d assumed that three plain would frame two coloured nicely, but because it’s ‘in the round’ I actually need equal numbers in order for them to line up appropriately. And using four means I can discard the last non-matching red strip which was done using the different wool and is perceptibly lighter.

17 February 2021

All five strips complete. The picots flare out a lot, partly because they’re not ribbed, partly because I think the crepe wool may be thicker.
There’s still an awful lot of sewing to be done!

14 February 2021

Ten pattern repeats on the first pink, three on the second. I’m trying to knit these two strips in parallel using both ends of centre-pull balls , but my attempts at winding centre-pull balls tend to end up in complete tangles sooner or later.
It certainly gives a new motivation to ‘just one more row’ - ‘just one more row until I’ve safely used up the loose loops that have just fallen off my ball’….

11 February 2021

I had literally just that moment cast off the final stitch of the crimson border on my third strip and cut all the ends on all the colours I had been using, and then I noticed that I had missed the second cable cross on the very last row of the main pattern.
So I’ve had to undo the entire border section back beyond the colour change and pick up the body stitches to restart that row. I just hope I can re-knit it using exactly the same amount of wool as last time - fortunately re-knitting usually seems to end up using a little less than the first time, either because the wool has stretched or because I’m more tense when doing it!

8 February 2021

Out of wool on the last row of the 20th repeat.

6 February 2021

The first part-ball ran out on the tenth repeat - just before the end of a row, so I ended up doing a braided join. Unfortunately the second part-ball is only 18g compared to the 26g of the first one…..

5 February 2021

Eight repeats done in third strip - and most of the way through the first part-ball of wool. This colour is definitely lighter and more orange than the first strip.

3 February 2021

I ran out of wool two pattern repeats before the border. It turns out that the colour that’s the best match by daylight looks quite a bit lighter by artificial light… in addition to being closer to a 4ply than a DK weight, so that the fabric formed is quite a bit floppier. Still, it’s only the bottom strip of an undergarment that isn’t actually designed to be seen!

Very weirdly, this strip actually weighs more than the first one (63 versus 53g) despite containing the same number of repeats, measuring the same length and including a section in lighter-weight wool. At any rate, the two remaining part-balls which appear to match each other -- they do at least seem to be the same weight as the first one, although they are detectably more orange in colour -- only amount to 42g between them, so presumably the third stripe will have a non-matching section at the bottom as well.

Further stripes will have to be in some completely different colour; if I’m doing five stripes in total, having two alternate panels framed between three reds should work out quite well, while separating the reds will make the differences between them less obvious.

2 February 2021

18 repeats, 12 inches on second strip,13g remaining. I’m going to be a little short on wool and will have to substitute in another scrap, I think.

29 January 2021

6 repeats done on second strip. 37g of wool remaining in this ball.

28 January 2021

I decided to use the crimson crepe wool (that I’d assumed was too much of a colour/texture contrast to be any use to combine with the others) to work the border section instead of the dark brown, and that shows up much better. This time round I switched colour on the 4th border row instead of the 5th, which also looks better. Note to self: the awkward ‘stray’ yarnover at the start of the line is actually very important, as it not only means that you don’t end up one stitch short of your next row but creates a diagonally-offset lattice instead of a square one!

Instead of working ‘alternate purl and plain’ for the last four rows, I made the decision to work ‘plain and purl’, i.e. creating the ‘plain’ side of the stocking stitch on the front of the work as the pattern mentions - I don’t know if ‘purl and plain’ was just the standard term for stocking stitch without the order having any significance, or whether they did in fact intend to mirror the raised section above, but for the purposes of folding under and sewing down the picot edge I feel that having it flat on the right side before folding works better. The ‘bump’ at the back then tucks neatly into the corresponding ‘trough’ created at the back of the upper stripe.

And instead of trying to fold the border in half, I folded it at the very edge of the openwork, to produce two rows of holes plus a picot edge where the final row is folded, with a solid backing behind. This gives a result much closer to the illustration and I assume is what is intended.

I’m much happier with this version!
(I don’t know what I’m going to do about border colour for the extra non-red stripes that are obviously going to be necessary, though; I could use the crimson crepe throughout, which would have a unifying effect but might look rather strident against, say, blue or mauve, or I could try to find a similarly toning border colour for the contrast panels.)

27 January 2021

First strip complete with 25 repeats - the wool ran out 4 rows into the border. I tried using a dark brown contrast as an edging (not actually the best of ideas, since the holes in the lace don’t show up) but I think the colour change actually needs to start at least one row earlier, otherwise the first row of holes is in a different colour….
I’m assuming this is lace: the instructions actually say “wool over needle, narrow and repeat to end of row”, but presumably ‘narrow’ has got to mean ‘knit two together’, thus creating a row of holes, judging by the illustration.

I’m not at all clear whether you fold the border in half or just turn under the final ‘plain’ rows, as the illustration (showing 2 sets of holes visible) seems to suggest. If you want a picot effect I think you actually need to fold it in half, and the sewing down would certainly be easier. Also, I don’t know whether the work being ‘plain on the right side’ refers to the state before or after it’s folded; when I tried to do it according to the pattern it seemed to come out as stocking stitch on the back of the fabric, and the illustration certainly seems to show a triple row of purl bumps visible at the top of the border. So maybe the pattern just means that you want to fold the two flat faces together for ease of sewing? Because in its unfolded state it appears to produce a result that is ‘plain’ on the wrong side (but mirroring the first half of the border, which is what one would expect).

25 January 2021

19 cable repeats (although I have a feeling at least one of them may be 4 rows instead of six) for about 14” of pattern; 35g of wool used out of 47g in the ball.

24 January 2021

Six inches or so of pattern at a width of 10” weighs about 18 grams. I might be able to get away with a 50” hem (I don’t really want too much bulk higher up in the petticoat, as it isn’t shaped; presumably it relies on the lace falling into folds) - my current ‘thermal’ petticoat is actually only 38” at the hem by 25” long, although the fabric is slightly stretchy and the width constricts my stride a little. If I have six inches or so of fabric yoke over the hips, as shown in the construction photo, can I get away with an 18” length plus the border? That would be 18g×3×5, which is approximately 270g of wool plus an unknown extra for the border… still rather a lot.

23 January 2021

I’m using double knitting as an equivalent to ‘Germantown’. Started off with size 8 needles, which produce a rather solid result; experimented with size 7 in order to get looser lace, but the stocking stitch columns look too loose, and I think it will just end up stretching massively when worn. Also, I was making vast numbers of mistakes with the yarnovers, which for some reason keep failing to twist together properly (because I’m purling into them the wrong way?) and then even with the cabling, so I decided to cast on again for an official start.
This is probably not TV knitting, I’m afraid, or at least not yet!
It’s going to take an awful lot of wool, though, and I don’t know that I have that much assorted red. My traditional red warm petticoat might end up exceedingly stripy….

Edit: notes to self.
You have to purl into the back of the yarnovers in order to get them to twist properly.
Row 4 goes (k14, p4, k14)*2, as noted by MCBurbage.

22 January 2021

I decided I needed a knitted petticoat for extra warmth.
And at least this one is made in stripes, so I can use different colours of wool to make up the quantity….