Two Skirts Finished!

I always feel clever when a plan comes together. Here are all the pieces of the orange wool skirt, laid out and ready to sew. It's a nice simple skirt pattern so there are four gores in each of the skirt and lining, three yoke pieces and three yoke facing pieces, plus of course, interfacing.

You have to sew the yoke to the skirt before you can put in the zipper. In spite of the slight differences in fabric weights and stretch, the dark brown sewed to the orange "wool" just fine.

Because I didn't want to go to the store, I just used the 23cm black zipper I had, instead of getting an 18cm dark brown skirt zipper. I am sure it will work out fine. Then I attached the lining to the bottom of the yoke by pinning it to the now ironed-open seam allowances where the yoke is attached to the skirt. I have to topstitch the seam allowances on the right side and I figured I could secure the lining with that topstitching. First I pinned the lining on the inside, to make sure it was properly lined up with the seam allowances. Then I put pins in around on the right side, so I could take them out as I sewed. I have decided it is bad for my machine to keep sewing over the pins as I have done all these years and although it slows me down a bit, I now remove pins as I go.

Here is the lining pinned both from the inside and the outside. Once all the pins were shifted to the outside, I sewed two lines of topstitching around on the yoke and skirt and the lining was attached. After that, I sewed the yoke facing (in black broadcloth) to the skirt and stitched it down by sewing in the "ditch" - the actual seam on the right side, between the yoke and the skirt.

I sewed the hem by hand. Often, especially on cotton and casual skirts, I sew a narrow machine hem but on these wool skirts, I decided to go by hand.

Once the skirt was finished and pressed, I cut off the excess lining fabric that showed past the finished wool hem. I had cut the lining gore pieces to the same size as the wool pieces so the hem of the lining would show if I just hemmed it up like the skirt. I had to make the lining shorter than the skirt and I decided to cut off fabric and make a narrower hem, rather than folding up the lining and making a wide hem.

I ironed up a fold of the lining and then a second fold and then I just sewed around it on the machine because it doesn't show.

Because the lining was only attached around the yoke, I decided to sew it to the zipper tape on the inside so it wouldn't get caught in the zipper when putting it on or off.

Finally, here are both skirts! You can see the purple one is shorter than the orange one and I am glad I used the dark fabric for the yoke, both for the extra length but also for the look. Now it's back to the winter coat!