Sewing project progress: full gathered skirt in red dupioni, part II

[breakinglight11]

My life is only packing, with occasional calls to utilities companies, and will be continued to be consumed with the move until next Tuesday. However I allowed myself to take a short break yesterday and reward myself for my diligence and responsibility by working on my skirt a little more.

Where we last left off, I had sewn the waistbad on three sides and needed to press it, while I put the basting stitches into the body of the skirt that I would pull to make the gathers. Yesterday I pressed the waistband and looked onto the next step. Gertie provided this paragraph of instructions.

"Next, you're going to pin the interfaced side of the waistband to the gathered skirt, right sides together. Now, find the middle of the waistband by folding it in half. Mark that point with a pin. Match the halfway point on the waistband to the side seam on your skirt. Next, pin the ends of the skirt piece to the end of the waistband. The finished ends of the waistband will match up to the raw edges of your skirt."

You have no idea how perplexed I was by this. Perhaps it makes immediate sense to you experienced sewists, but I couldn't parse from this how the two pieces were supposed to be fit together. I didn't get how the edge of the skirt was supposed to meet with the finished ends of the waistband-- how was that supposed to look when the skirt was finished? Wouldn't you see the messy inner bits? But then I remembered a comment that wired_lizard had posted on my last sewing report-- "This may be different in your pattern, but the way I discovered that the waistband worked on my thingamajig was that waistband and skirt went right sides together (plus gathers) and sewed with a normal seam allowance, and then you fold the waistband up. So the seam is hidden in the fold." That turned out to be exactly what was intended, and her saying that allowed me to parse that out of the instructions. So thanks, Tory, that helped me enormously! Sewing can really be an interesting logic problem, figuring out how the pieces will have to fit together in order to give you the result you want.

At least part of the problem was that I had pinned the unsewn seam of the skirt together to make it easier to divide the skirt in quarters to put in the gather basting. So when I laid the skirt flat, it was actually doubled over on itself. I had to unpin that open side and lay it out so that I could match the ends of the skirt piece to the ends of the waistband. Not only did that make the gathers look a lot better, as they were condensed to the proper degree, it also saved me from sewing both sides of the skirt together at the waistband and making it impossible to put on!

So, I followed the steps. I gathered the skirt using my four basting seams (which worked just fine, by the way) and then pinned the top of the skirt, right side to right side, to the finished edge of the interfaced side of the waistband. From this configuration I can see how the other side of the band is supposed to be flipped down to hide the seam joining the two pieces, just as Tory said. It's actually starting to look like a real skirt!

The next step will be to actually sew it, which is what I hope to move on to this afternoon. That is, if I get all the day's moving-related chores completed to my satisfaction. But I am proud of myself for being able to figure out the instructions when they were intially tough for me. I imagine as I get more familiar with sewing, I will be able to make certain logical leaps about construction that I am not experienced enough with to recognize now.

Comments

[lisefrac.livejournal.com]

Oops, I must have missed your earlier question about how the waistband worked. Glad Tory could help!

Yeah, sometimes a pattern can be a bit of a puzzle! You'd think it would be easier with commercial patterns, with their drawings, but it's not always. Sometimes you spend a lot of time trying to figure out what they're doing in that tiny tiny figure. When I was doing my Gibson Girl blouse, for example, and doing the pintucks on the front, I could not figure out how to get the number of pintucks they wanted into the space they wanted. Turns out I should have been making the seams for all the pintucks in a section, THEN pressing them (instead of seam, press, repeat), because when you press them (one direction or another) they take up more room. The pintucks are a little wonky on the top, if you look closely - but meh.

Anyway, all of this is just to say that more and more of this will make sense the more you do. There are only so many ways of constructing the same type of garment, so it will become familiar after a while.

[katiescarlett29.livejournal.com]

I think it looks great! (Certainly better than my crochet dishcloth, in any case. :p)