Tripping around in circles

After nearly a decade of being a Long Skirt Person I have been expanding my wardrobe to include more pants and short skirts. A style I have long admired is the long-yoke-and-pleats look but didn't know where to get it or how to wear it. But, given the aforementioned style experimentation, I was beginning to see how it would fit into my wardrobe.

I had drawn a design a while ago and had mentally picked some stash fabric and a pattern, so it was time to get it all out and see if my plan would actually work. The design featured an asymmetrical yoke, two layers of ruffles over one layer of mesh and a circle-skirt layer over everything.

For someone who can't draw, a kids' fashion design book is a great tool.

Ingredients:
264 x 75cm curtain offcut
Black mesh
Kwik sew 3362
Interfacing
Lining
Thread-for-topstitching

From having made the pattern before, I knew where the yoke would sit on me and how it would hang (by which I mean it has a weird nobble on the side seam where the yokes go together that needs to be smoothed out a bit). I left the top yoke as is and extended the second layer down into an A-line shape. My plan was to make up the body of the skirt and then mock-up the circle layer onto it in order to decide how long to make it. Since I was dealing with a limited amount of fabric, I decided to line the yoke in a different fabric (black) so I would have more of the main fabric available for the circle and ruffles.

I didn't make a mock-up because I had made the skirt before, and tried it on as part of my pattern making. But when I tried on my new version it didn't do up – by a fair bit. The lower part was wonky and didn't fit together easily with the top. Some of this might be due to 'the mysteries of fabric' but I suspect the original pattern of being kind-of dodgy. I haven't worn my other skirt very much – there's something slightly off about it. I thought the problem was lower down than the pieces I was repurposing but maybe not.

Chief suspect

After a small meltdown, I significantly widened the pattern for the top yoke and re-angled the lower piece top edge to meet it. And got rid of the nobble properly because what I'd done the first time hadn't got it completely. Then, I made a mock-up of the skirt.

I then mocked up the circle layer by cutting out a very big circle and cutting out the waist to be a bit larger than the yoke measurement. I sewed the round waist into the asymmetrical yoke, then cut back the edge of the circle so it would be a parallel with the hem (ground/waist/horizon – I forget what I measured it from). It ended up looking like this:

So, with some careful placement, I could recut the yoke and skirt and just have enough left for the circle and several widths for ruffles. I made up the inner and outer layers separately as much as I could to avoid fitting things awkwardly around the sewing machine. This skirt was a whole conundrum of working out what order to do things in and which way to face the seam allowances. I got some of it right, but also ended up hemming the ruffles after everything was sewn together which was definitely not the best way.

Outside, inside.

I was worried that after a few years of not doing any invisible zips I would have forgotten how to do them, but I think this is one of my best.

I had originally imagined gathering the ruffles, but when I looked at how that would sit, it was a bit too plain, so I decided on box-pleating them instead. I sewed three widths together for each layer and eyeballed the pleat sizes. This came to almost the length of the hem, and I had enough left in scraps to make up gap.

The mesh layer is knife pleated. I tacked down the pleats before ironing them to avoid the fabric melting from the hot pins, and finished the top edge with Hong Kong binding.

When attaching the ruffles, I made sure to stagger them so one layer had its box over the other layer's inverted box.

All the hems and the top and bottom of the yoke have two rows of topstitching, some of which were twin needled and some of which were just done carefully (so I could see the hem I was supposed to be sewing down).

I'm really happy with how the skirt turned out. I had moments of nearly giving up, but the finished product looks as polished as I'd hoped and I've worn it quite a bit. Most of me wants to never touch the pattern again, but there is a little part that thinks, cos it's fixed now, if I want a symmetrical yoke, I may as well just adapt it some more.