The fruits of my sewcation #2 Summerskirt with pleats
This skirt from KnipMode May 2008, is really the fruit of me wanting to sew up something quickly, just for the fun of it. Back in 2010 I sewed this skirt but it never got worn because it was too tight. I don’t remember if this was due to the fact that I gained weight in those days, or that I simply didn’t take measurements and made it too small. Believe it or not, that happened more than once back then.
This time I took a size 46, which is closest to my hip-measurement. I compared that to my own measurements and decided I needed to widen the waist with 13 cm. These cm were evenly divided as follows:
- 2,25
cm at both sides of the sidepanels, grading out to 0 at the hemline. (4 x 2,25
= 9)
- 1 cm
at both sides of the centre pieces of the back- and frontskirt (both skirt and
yoke). (4 x 1 = 4)
That gave me the extra room of 13 cm that I needed. If this pattern would be available in a size 48, I would have chosen that, but it isn’t.
Though it seemed this was going to be a fairly quick make, I had a few hickups along the way.
One had
to do with sewing on the yoke in the back. You have to topstitch on top of the
yoke which means the seams on the inside have to be folded upwards. But how do
you do that when you have a zipper at that place plus the bulk of a pleat? I
managed to do so by cutting off the zipperends at the bottom as close as I
dared and cutting away fabric in the seam as much as possible. It worked in the
end and I think I managed to finish it neatly on the outside. The inside however
is another story.
This is not something that’s mentioned in the sewingdescription. I wonder how many sewists have stumbled upon that problem….
If I
were to make this skirt again, I would put a centreback seam in de backpanel of
the skirt, just as in the yoke, so the zipper doesn’t collide with a horizontal
and upwards seam at its bottom but can just let its little legs hang down freely.
The other thing was that, in spite of me taking accurate measurements, the skirt ended up too wide in the waist. The fabric is a cotton with a bit of stretch. Enough stretch to hold it’s original shape. (I checked several times!) And even if it would have stretched a bit, I made sure to cut out the facings in the original shape of the patternpieces and interfaced them with non-stretching material. I don’t know how but somehow this facings must have stretched as well.
To solve
this I unpicked the facing at the sideseams, took away the extra width by
putting a dart in the sidepanels and closed the facingpieces with a wider seam
so it fitted the new width of the sidepanels. Those darts are hardly visible
because of the print of the fabric. I sewed the facing back on and now it fits
perfectly.
Fruit #3 of my sewcation, a summer dress, will be in my next post.
Stay safe, talk to you soon!
Lilian
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