I knew I'd have to make one eventually!

Now that I have several full-skirted vintage dresses, I can't escape the fact that I need a petticoat, too. I'll be wearing American Beauty on Friday in the fashion show and competition at the American Quilter's Society national show in Paducah, KY, so I need to get the petticoat made! I'm not even sure if I'll need to wear it - it depends on if it looks ok with the red coat. It might make the skirt too big to fit under the coat. Regardless, it's neat to have one if I need one.

If I'm wearing it with vintage dresses, it might as well be vintage, too, right? I actually own two vintage petticoat patterns. One came with the Vogue pattern I'm using for Diamonds - that was a full skirted dress before I decided that I wanted a straight skirt. The Simplicity is a pattern just for petticoats and slips.

They're both similar in that they have a yoke. The yoke is nice because it reduces bulk around the abdomen area, which would occur if all that net were attached to a waistband. They're different in that the Vogue one is much fuller. I decided to use the Vogue with the reasoning that if I'm going to make one, it's going to be full!

The only problem with the Vogue is that it take a lot of fabric. More netting than what I bought for the project. Somewhere, deep in the back of my mind, I thought I had put some white petticoat net back into the stash from another project. Sure enough, I pulled out enough netting to finish cutting out the bottom ruffles!

Check out the pieces below:

The main portion of the skirt is piece #3, and that's only half of it - it's cut on a fold. It needs to be gathered onto those two yoke pieces you see in front of it. You can also see a little bit of piece #4, which is the same width, but two of those get sewn together to form the bottom ruffle for piece #3. That bottom ruffle has two layers gathered together and sewn on at the same time.

The pattern layout shows the yoke cut out of net. I don't know about you, but wearing petticoat net right next to my skin isn't terribly appealing. My solution was to get some of that white silk charmeuse and organza from my stash and cut the yokes out of that. I'll use the organza as an underlining and make an additional lining out of another layer of charmeuse. There's also a large portion of white ribbon in the picture above. That's to face the hem of the layer closest to my legs. Raw petticoat net on the legs doesn't sound like fun, either. This should go together quickly, so maybe by tomorrow I'll be able to post the final results!

Parting Shots: We actually had the windows open today! The weather was really lovely today, so it was a good opportunity to air out the house. Any open window attracts the cats, so here's Pix, fascinated by the smells and sights of outdoors: