Two Skirts!

Success! You know when you have too much fabric when you can't remember everything in your stash. I went looking this morning for "something brown" and rediscovered this "wool" stuff I had made a jacket out of years ago. The pattern was wrong for the fabric and it never fit right so I put it in the Sally Ann box so I wouldn't have to feel guilty about throwing something "perfectly good" away.

The dark fabric is slightly heavier than the orange and has a different weave - a sort of herringbone - but it IS brown and not black and has a tiny gold fleck in it. I think it will make a great yoke and, unlike the bright orange, not be a spotlight that says, "tummy here!" I am making the yoke facing in a black broadcloth to cut back on the bulk.

I have lots of thread I can use and the dark brown second from the left looks most likely for any topstitching. I also have two zippers - one black and the other a light brown I purchased specifically for this orange fabric. However, now that I am making the yoke out of a dark brown, I am wondering if I should look for a dark brown zipper. I think so. I plan to zigzag stitch all around each wool gore so all I will need to do to finish the seams is press them open. I have pinked the edges of all the lining gores and will sew them together. Then I will hang the lining from the bottom of the yoke and it will hang freely, more like a slip.

I remeasured the purple skirt and it is only 22 inches from waist to finished hem, not 24 as I thought in the previous post. I wanted the skirt to be as long as possible and so I cut it out as in the photo. These gore pieces are 24 inches long so the skirt will be about 26 inches long finished.

Unless I know I will never make a longer skirt, I hate cutting off the longer skirt options on the pattern pieces because I can never get them lined up properly afterwards. What I do for a curved hem such as this skirt has, is fold the pattern piece up on the hem line at each side of the pattern piece and them cut in a mirror image. It's really not as difficult as it may seem.

In the meantime, I finished the purple skirt. Here it is, wrong side out on the ironing board with its blue lining showing. You can also see the grey facing for the yoke (which will be black broad cloth in the orange skirt) and the hanging loops I attached to the yoke. I make them out of whatever bits of hemming lace or twill tape I have lying about.

Here's the hem before I ironed it. I sewed black hemming lace on with a purple zigzag machine stitch. Then I stitched it up by hand.