simple modern sewing wrap skirt – pattern 5c

So this week hasn’t been a very good week for my sewing machine as it is unwell and has been sent away to be fixed….very sad. It’s got something wrong with the foot pedal which keeps beeping every other second and stopping me from sewing. This has been highly irritating while trying to complete recent projects as you can imagine. Anyway it got taken away the end of last week and hopefully won’t be gone too long…fingers crossed.

On a more positive note knowing it would be leaving pushed me to finish whatever I could and this meant my Simple Modern Sewing Skirt…finally!

So like I said I was going to write about this is a bit more detail just in case it might be useful to someone. I know when I make things I always look for other examples especially if I’m having difficulties like this time.

My two main problems were……..

1. That the description in the book wasn’t too clear. For a start the skirt isn’t really a wrap skirt in the sense you’d expect and also some of the instructions weren’t really detailed enough for a beginner like me.
2. Once I’d figured out exactly what I was meant to be doing I found that the yoke was too small to do what it was meant to be doing.

I know my waist isn’t the smallest, but it’s not that big either and my hips are pretty non existent so i was pretty surprised to find that it was going to be a struggle to get the supposed oversized waist band over my hips and to my waist. Initially I did think it must be some kind of miscalculation on my part, but this didn’t seem to be the case. Then I thought well it must the size I’d chosen…I opted for small which may have been a bit optomistic on my part…but even large wasn’t ideal because in total the size of the yoke (large) is about 38″ and my lower waist/hip measurement is 35″. This doesn’t leave much room for the wrapping effect! So I took the brave step of trying to adapt the pattern with great doubt as to how successful I would actually be.

In the end I made a number of alterations which include:

Using the size small skirt with a much larger yoke so that it wouldn’t be too bulky. In the end the yoke/facing measured 45″….21″ round the back and 24″ round the front. This allows for the wrapping effect and means that I don’t have to use a zip to get the skirt into place.

I only made half tucks round the back as I didn’t want to skirt to be too full and left out the pleats in centre front to prevent the skirt from giving that pregnancy/bloated effect.

I drew up my own ties as I wanted them to be larger than recommended and then I topstitched them as I know how much of a nightmare it can be to iron those kind of things otherwise. I think in the book they’re meant to wrap right round the skirt with loopholes holding them in place, but I tend to find that never feels very secure and it seemed better to keep them fairly close together.

One other change that I intend to make is to add a button and button hole, just to keep the band more securely in place. This will have to wait until my sewing machine returns!

Other than that, now finished, I really like the skirt and would definitely make it again. Although this pattern may not have been great for me what’s good about this book is that there are three styles based around the same kind of pattern so I feel it should be fairly simple (as the book says) to make one of the other skirts.

Watch this space….!

Linking up with Let’s Get Acquainted at Blossom Heart Quilts.