I have lots of “little” skirts, but it’s nice to have some longer, looser, wider skirts too. To be more refined, relaxed, ladylike and elegant, and less, er, whatever I was before. This pattern is Burdastyle 02/2014, 106, and delivers the required dose of elegance quite nicely, I think.
Even in an annoyingly brisk breeze that turned up, just at the right time to buffet it about in my pictures here! The wind tried, but never once did I come anywhere near doing a Marilyn in any of my shots. Thank goodness for that! Ladylike personified. Or, should I say, skirtified? Yeah, I think maybe I should 😉
So, yes, it is looking a bit windblasted here, but that’s “real” or whatever. My fabric is a mid-heavyweight, richly creamy-coloured satin remnant from Fabulous Fabrics; I suspect from the bridal section. Probably if I’d made it up in the suggested brocade it would hang properly smart with the big box pleats standing out nice and stiffly-straight and looking just like the one on the magazine cover, at right, but I think that the luxurious feel of the satin rippling and swishing against my legs is a happy bonus.
The skirt is pretty simple; wide, deeply pleated skirt sections attached to a fitted, curved yoke. The pattern is super straightforward, all going together very easily and quickly. I would describe this as fast gratification; a nicely stress-free project.
There are two views to the pattern; the other, illustrated in the line drawing, is a more complex version with a bigger rectangular piece of fabric pleated over the yoke as an over layer. This feature you can just make out on the magazine cover, above, at right. I made the simplified version with plain yoke because hello, remnant.
I lined the yoke in ivory polycetate lining fabric, also from Fabulous Fabrics, and used an off-white invisible zip in the CB seam. I wanted the skirt to be as long as long as I possibly could make it, and managed to cut the skirt pieces to be about 10cm longer than the pattern. Then hemmed as stingily and as meanly as humanly possibly, by stitching to the lower edge a bias cut strip of pale ivory/yellow cotton voile in a very narrow 2/8″ seam. This enabled me to only turn up a mere 2/8″ of my satin but still to have a nice deep hem. The hem is slip-stitched by hand.
