If you are knitting a knee-length
coat or you want to stabilize loose knitted fabric, lining is a great option. I will be sharing some things that I have learned about lining knits that I hope will be helpful.
I was fortunate enough to attend Jean Frost’s Stitches class on how to line a Chanel-style jacket last year. I strongly recommend the class. Jean Frost is a great teacher, and she had so many useful tips and pieces of technical information to share! I brought in one of the sleeves from the Emerald Blocks jacket I was knitting, and it took the entire two day workshop for me to get that sleeve fully lined with silk. But I learned so much that it was totally worth it! I believe Jean Frost has an information section on lining hand knits in her latest book, “Custom Knit Jackets; Casual to Couture” which would be well worth reading.
After my adventure lining the Emerald Merino jacket designed by Jean Frost, I decided to build on what I had already learned and make my own design for a Chanel-style jacket so I could improve my lining technique. Since one of the most classic looks is a white jacket with black trim, I decided to use that as my inspiration. Here is the result:
I combined several yarns together to get the tweedy look that I wanted for this white jacket, and chose a textured stitch that I hoped would give the fabric a pseudo-woven look. More about the yarn and stitch pattern in my next post. To finish off the garment, I lined it in white polka-dotted silk.
Now all I need is a matching blouse underneath, and I have saved some of the polka dotted silk for that purpose. I just have to get over my fear of my sewing machine! For me, hand sewing is much easier than machine sewing, but I will have to get over my sewing machine phobia somehow. In the meantime, after my adventures lining these two hand knit Chanel-style jackets, I culled some useful guidelines that perhaps will be helpful to others as well.
1. 1. Sew the lining on by hand, don’t use a sewing machine.
There is a simple reason for this. Hand-knitted fabric is flexible and machine stitching is not. Machine sewn stitches create permanent, firm lines that cannot stretch in the same way that knitted fabric will. Therefore, the two will not live in harmony together over the life of the garment. One great technique that I learned from Jean Frosts’s class was this: To ensure that your hand-sewn quilting has flexibility, don’t knot the ends of your threads when you finish a line of quilting stitches. Just tuck the thread ends inside the lining, so they will be sealed in the area where the wrong side of the lining faces the wrong side of the knitted piece, out of sight. Keep the thread ends several inches long, so they will have plenty of range of movement over time without your stitches pulling out. That way, as your piece stretches, the stitching in the lining can stretch as well. I left about five inches of thread ends at the end of each line of stitching.
2. 2. Sew the wrong side of the lining against the wrong side of the knitted fabric. That way, the right sides of both will be visible, and your lining fabric’s right side is displayed every time you open your jacket and take it off. Don’t expect yourself to remember what the wrong sides of your lining are—mark them with chalk or some other erasable marker before you start quilting so you don’t waste time quilting the wrong sides of the fabric together! You would think this would be obvious, but on my second project I caught myself quilting a sleeve back to the right side of the lining and had to pull out my basting and start all over again!
3. 3. Use vertical lines of hand stitching to secure the lining. This quilting approach originated with Chanel jackets, so if you are looking for a similar effect, use the same approach to your lining. The purpose of the quilting was to stabilize a loosely woven fabric with a silk backing so that it would hold its shape. If you want a guide, after you pin your knitted piece and the silk lining together, you can baste vertical lines with a contrast thread as a marker first, starting with the middle of the piece that is being lined, and then placing each successive seam one inch out from the midpoint to the right and left, until you reach the edge of the piece, so that everything is symmetrical. Leave plenty of room on the sides for seams. For me, two inches away from the sides of each piece I stopped quilting and just left the knitted fabric and the silk fabric loose, to be dealt with when the whole garment was assembled later.
4. 4. Line each piece individually. Each piece of your handknit jacket should be quilted with a lining before you assemble your garment. Then you will sew the knitted pieces together to form the completed garment, and then finally you will sew the seams of the lining fabric together to finish the inside. As you can see from the image below, after the knitted pieces were assembled, the edges of the silk lining were folded under, overlapped over each other (front lining overlaps the back) and then secured using hand stitching.
5. 5. Decide that you are going to line your project BEFORE you knit it. This is absolutely essential, because the lining process pulls in the knitted fabric, basically making it smaller by at least one garment size. To make matters worse, lined knit fabric loses all its stretch, so principles of negative ease no longer will show off your figure, and your jacket will simply look too small. After assembling my two jackets, I have found that at least 3 inches of the garment are lost to the lining process. So, in future, I will add at least 3 inches to the finished dimensions that I want to have for any jacket I knit. On the other hand, if you end up with a knitted garment that went off gage and knitted up way too big, lining it may be a great solution to improve the fit.
6. 6. Build in extra room for the bust and hips. Most Chanel jackets sit on the high hip area, where hips tend to curve the least, so that calculation is not quite as much of a headache as the bust, but make sure that when you choose a size for your knitting pattern that you choose a size that will accommodate your high hip measurement + ease for the lining. In other words, if the jacket sits on the hip 4 1/2 inches below the waist, measure the width of your hips 4 1/2 inches below the waist, and use that measurement + ease for the lining when you choose the pattern size. Because I have wider hips, I tend to lengthen my Chanel jackets, as that looks more flattering on me, so my jackets are usually 5.45 - 6.5 inches long after the waist, which means the measurement is even wider and I have to choose a larger size.
T The bust measurement is even more important. Silk lining renders the knitted fabric inflexible compared to a normal knit, so the fabric will not stretch to accommodate your bust the way it usually does. If you are over a B cup, you might want to strongly consider using bust darts or some other technique to add in enough fabric to accommodate your upper curvature. Otherwise, what will happen is that the edges of the jacket will be distorted, creating a curve in front because more gapping is occuring in the bust area. By the time I discovered this problem with my white jacket, it was too late to go back and reknit the front pieces, as they had already been quilted in silk. If I could have done it all over again, I would have knitted bust darts in the front to avoid this problem. See how, in the photo below, the jacket edges are furthest apart at the bust? Lesson learned!
7. 7. Sew on your pockets before you line the front pieces! Since you do not want the stitching for your pocket joins to mess up your beautiful lining, you must complete all the pocket work before you line the front pieces. That way, when you open up your jacket, the inside will be as beautiful as the outside! As a little extra, I also lined my pocket pieces with silk before I sewed them onto the fronts, and I love the way they turned out:
In spite of the front curvature, I love my White Chanel jacket and I wear it all the time to work. Thanks to the lining, it is an elegant classic piece I can wear all year long.