Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Long Pleated Skirt

This is an original design based loosely on (late) 1930's fashion, with my own spin on things. It's a very plain skirt, mostly an experiment in pleats, which are just as tedious as I remember. Last time I did a fully pleated garment was quite a while ago... I think I've come a long way since making my Hogwarts uniform.

 This is a wool fabric with a nice weight to it. It hangs nicely, though I wish the colour was a touch brighter. I like it with the bronze-y coloured buttons. :)
I patterned the waistband to dip down in the front, but somehow managed to seriously mess up my math and made it 5 inches too big... Not sure how that happened. :/
The skirt panels are all rectangles, and there are 18 pleats. The pleats are a lot of math that I can't possibly explain. It involved deciding how many pleats I wanted, how full I wanted the skirt and then doing lots of division. All I can really say is that it is much easier to do in centimeters than inches...

Also: so much ironing. Every single pleat had to be ironed before and after sewing.
The most difficult part was that I added in hidden pockets to this skirt. They are hidden under one of the pleats, built into the seams joining the front panels to the back.
After attaching the waistband, I did all the top stitching on the pleats and the waistband.

< Here you can see one of the hidden pockets.

The last step was the buttons and button holes.

2 comments:

  1. Very beautifully done - what a wonderful effort! Much success in all that you do

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  2. Very beautifully done - what a wonderful effort! Much success in all that you do

    ReplyDelete