hello! I made a few new skirts, using a new pattern, the Acacia skirt. The pattern is a Peppermint magazine and Warp and Weft collaboration… available in the magazine for free, or as a pdf pattern from their website. It’s a cute little A-line miniskirt with deep deep pockets and a central back zip closure. Of course I’m always going to be interested in a winter miniskirt pattern with pockets! I couldn’t wait to try it out!
Unusually for me, I decided to make a sort of toile. It’s a wearable toile, of course. For this, I used a piece of fabric that was given to me by my Indonesian sister-in-law. It was fortunately the absolute perfect size to cut out the skirt!
I really like this little skirt but I’m glad I made a toile, because I felt that the front was a bit flat for me, making it jut out a bit at the waistline. I unpicked the pocket joining seam and cut out a dart allowance from the pocket on the inner edge, and this worked really well. So I made this same adjustment when I made the real version, the corduroy one.
The wide wale corduroy I used for the “real” skirt is is colour Amber from Warp and Weft (available on their website here). I decided to do a “nice” finish to all the raw edges inside and applied a HongKong finish. For this I found a small scrap of lovely brown linen leftover from my patchwork dress. It was just enough to finish the skirt.
Corduroy is a little tricky when it comes to the seams lining up in the wales… and centre back seams are notorious for turning out pretty terrible, so I did this zip insertion by hand so it looks perfect. So glad I did this!
Initially, I added 10cm to the length of the skirt, I thought this would be necessary because the samples I saw did look quite short on the models… however after a few wears I have to admit that I felt like it was a little too long after all. Trust in the designer! I ended up lopping off that extra 10cm. I wouldn’t rule out adding length to the design again in the future, but a lining is absolutely necessary, imo.
Is it a little too short now? I’m not sure, maybe. It still has a reasonable hem so I could still add a little length back. Probably in the future I would add 5cm and then see how I feel about that.
