Victorian Petticoat based on Truly Victorian free pattern

When you’ve got a hoop skirt, you’ve got to have a petticoat to go on top of it. Otherwise you can see all the hoops through it.

I made my petticoat based off the Truly Victorian Free Petticoat Pattern. They’ve got all the yardage listed there although I ended up buying an entire bolt of muslin because I figured I could always use it for actual muslins but I needed up using most of it.

I couldn’t find fabric with eyelet on one side and I wanted more ruffles so I bought separate pre-ruffled eyelet lace to use on the bottom of the top layer. It turned out to be a decent compromise.

Attaching the eyelet ruffles to the bottom of the skirt. I think I bought the whole “bolt” of the ruffle lace which was 10 yards.

I also had some serious issues with the bottom layer of my skirt. The bottom layer of the pattern isn’t gathered as much as the top layer although I did add a plain fabric ruffle to it as well for extra “poof.” Somehow when I gathered it, it ended up shorter than expected and didn’t quite fit over my hoop skirt. I thought my calculations for the amount of ruffling were good . . . but apparently I was off. So I had to add some wedges in at the sides and back.

I did this by cutting out wedge pieces (here I’m cutting 2 at once) that matched the bottom skirt. I had some leftover as you can see in the picture above (which should have been the first sign that something was wrong :P)

Then I cut a slit into the bottom layer of the skirt at the sides and back and stitched in my wedge along the sides. You can’t see this layer anyways so no harm done as you can see below:

This is the petticoat as the free pattern says to make it. Clearly you can still see the hoops through the top layers. The bottom part has 2 layers as described above so that part was fine. But this was not going to cut it.

So I added not one, but two extra layers because I was pretty sure one wouldn’t be enough to hide those hoops. And I’m glad I did.

Each layer, including the bottom two, was gathered using my serger. This is actually the first time I’ve gathered using my serger and it was pretty cool how well it worked! I will definitely be using this for the next petticoat because I really want a pale pink petticoat next so we’ll have to make another. My understanding is that back in the day ladies would wear 5 or more petticoats as needed to hide the hoops!

And here’s a back view. I need to fix the tie. It doesn’t quite get tight enough and then the petticoat sags a bit, but should be an easy fix . . . but probably won’t get done until absolutely necessary of course.