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 So I've wanted to revisit Simplicity 8241 from 1987--I don't have my own photo of the pattern envelope, and I don't particularly want to take one at the moment.  There are two listings for it on eBay right now, so I borrowed this from one of those

My copy is in size 8, which was fine when I first acquired and made it (for the only time) over 20 years ago.  No so much now.

Earlier in the week, I had pulled a piece of red and black and white plaid fabric--cotton, not quite coarse enough to be homespun, but not really lightweight enough for me to want to go ahead and make it into another try at a buttoned shirt with a scoop neckline instead of a collar, with no print mixing.  The fabric was also 36", so I would not have been able to eke out even the tiny sleeves. So. No shirt from that fabric.

But, I got it in my mind that I absolutely would use that fabric next. And eventually I thought, hey, I could mix prints with it after all.  Maybe a skirt?  Tiered, with each tier in a separate fabric? ...or...gored...with the fabric mixed across gores...  And that led back to Simplicity 8241.

Which I didn't exactly use.  It's a twelve gore skirt, and there are six separate pattern pieces for those  twelve gores.  I didn't wanna deal with that.  I dug out the back center piece and cut 12 of those, adding some extra width to the top, as well as shortening it by two inches from the top.

Yeah, in retrospect: bad idea.

I knew one fabric I wanted to use with the plaid, but needed another to be able to make everything.  Meh, I have a lot of cloth, I'll find something good.

Hey, guess what?  I did not find something good.  I did find something adequate, and I sewed it all together, but...I'm not happy about it.

Maybe, maybe, if the green fabric were cotton instead of polyester, maybe I would like it better.  Probably not.  The green was my desperation fabric--the plaid and floral are lovely together.

Another huge issue was the fact that I just...randomly added width to the gore shape, no measuring, and it ended up several inches larger than needed to fit the waistband (cut in size 18 from Simplicity 9815, which I have used many times.)  Of course, the best thing to have done would have been to have re-sewn all of the upper parts of the gores with a larger seam allowance tapering down to normal, to make it all smaller at the top.

I did not do that.

I gathered it slightly.

This was also a mistake.

At this point, the mistakes were adding up, so I said Whatever and...didn't even interface the waistband.   Yeah.

The zipper matches the green nicely,  though.

I was determined to finish this, on the off chance it turned out to be one of those "excruciating to make, so much fun to wear" projects (spoiler: it did not), but I was not going to try to do a blind hem in thin polyester, so I pressed it up 5/8" twice and stitched through all layers.  Which did not help my final evaluation of the project.

I think this project did teach me that, if I want to try this pattern again, I should cut all six of the pattern pieces, and maybe just take smaller seam allowances, since there are so many gore seams that that should make a significant difference in finished size.

This one, though...honestly, I might just take it apart...