Please Do Not Adjust Your Skirt pays homage to the role that television has played in pop culture and in our daily lives. PDNAYS features the SMPTE test pattern bars that used to be a staple of late-night screens when there were no 24 hour channels and were often accompanied by the message “Please do not adjust your set”.

The skirt is constructed in pieces, and worked all in garter except for the waistband. First an SMPTE bar panel is worked in garter intarsia, and then a second made to match. Then two side panels are made (a bit like the black bars on your screen in letterbox). Once the side panels are the same height as the bar panel, stitches are picked up along the top of each bar panel and the skirt yoke is worked up to the waist in the round. For finishing, the waistband is folded over and stitched to make a casing through which elastic is run, and last the bar panels are seamed to the side panels.

Knit skirts can be a delight to wear. But given the vast range of human form, and the paucity of sizing information for the lower half of the body, they can be a bit of a nightmare to design.

PDNAYS will fit best with a bit of negative ease at the waist, and some positive ease to cover the hips and thighs. The pattern includes customization calculations - the tools you need to make skirt to best suit your measurements if you fall outside the “standards”. You can work a custom hip size and/or waist size and have the option to add short rows to make your hem sit level if you carry more upholstery on one side of your body than the other.

Cascade 220 is used here for two reasons. First, its vast range of colors made it easy to match the quite specific colors used in the SMPTE bars that form the basis of the design. Second, it’s a wool with good memory and is reasonably hard-wearing. While I love the idea of someone wearing their PDNAYS every day, this is more likely to be an occasional wardrobe piece and will need only the usual care of hand-washing and maybe a seasonal de-pilling. If you are substituting yarn, color range should guide first, and wearability second. Cotton is not at all recommended for this garment, as it has very little memory retention.

On a personal note, I’ve had this idea in my sketchbook for over five years and it very nearly became a cushion because making a skirt that can fit a wide range of skirt-wearing humans is a mountain of work. I’m grateful to the team at Knitty.com for choosing this design for the pop culture edition.

See that bottom photo? That’s me, the designer, who grabbed the sample - made for my model who has a 16in smaller waist - as I was heading out the door to a wool festival, and bravely tried it on. Bless all the gods for the invention of elastic. :) But you know what? I was pretty chuffed to be able to wear my work. Maybe I (we?) should do that more: wear our work, let friends take our photo, embrace the things we like, silence the voices in our head that say we can’t wear a thing.