Sew I Am: Three Tier Skirt

I realized that I have made a small stack of shirts, plus a few jumpers, and no skirts I can wear (the skirt I made with the Lekala pattern is too big--I do want to take it apart and re-sew it...eventually...) So, I decided to take a beak from trying to get the shirt pattern how I want it to make a skirt. I used to wear tiered skirts a lot, so that that's what I did.

This kind of skirt doesn't need a pattern--rip a narrow strip for the waistband, and rip a lot of wider strips to assemble into long strips to make the tiers, then start gathering.

Of course, I automated that--and the eventual 'whole lotta hem'--with sewing machine gadgets

And so a skirt was made

I used a black cottony fabric that seems? to have a significant synthetic content. Not at all sure where I got that fabric, but there was (and still is) a lot of it.

There are pockets, too. I sewed them to each edge of the topmost tier, then sewed one side/pocket, leaving the other side free. I gathered the upper edge on its own so I could make it fit the waistband, making sure the sewn pocket was in the middle...which would eventually be the side.

I gathered the second tier--three fabric widths long--to the bottom of the first by just running the second tier through the ruffler directly on top of the first tier. Now...I've been using the ruffler long enough that I have a pretty good chance of adjusting it to the correct setting. Pretty good. And I was close on this one! I had to stop and add about 4" to the end to make it long enough. Once that was sorted out, the seam allowance got serged and then edge stitched through all layers for strength.

I adjusted the ruffler to make slightly shallower tucks and attached the four-fabric-width length third tier to the bottom of the second tier. Did I mention that the strips of fabric for the tiers were 8" wide? Really not sure how wide the tiers are after sewing together. Anyway. The ruffle almost made it all the way around before running out of fabric--I had to set the ruffler to regular stitch for the last 2" and it ended up being only about ¼" short, which was fine.

I sewed that side together, including pockets (I was good and pressed the seams in the strips that went into the tiers, but I...uh...haven't yet pressed this big side seam...)

After sewing the side seam, I attached the ~¼" hem roller to the machine and sewed the hem. There were a few areas that went wrong, in the ways that hem rollers do. Since this hem is very large and very ruffly and very "black thread on black fabric," I went ahead and just picked out and re-sewed the problem areas, instead of picking out and re-sewing the entire hem.

My pocket pictures are usually bad, but this one...yeah.

That's OK! Another lazy aspect of this project was that I didn't change the serger thread, so every non-selvedge edge is outlined on the inside. So: clearly visible pockets, inside view!

They're a little higher than is comfortable, because I needed to keep their openings within the first tier.

I made the waistband like I recently made sleeve bands, by pressing in half lengthwise, then pressing under one edge, sewing the unpressed edge to the back, then flipping the pressed around and edge stitching from the outside. Despite the fact that I had about three more yards of this fabric to use, I managed to make the waist band a bit narrow and the elastic is really crammed in. It can be fixed, but...will it be fixed...