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Making your own skirt pattern

In January this year, a very special friend gave me a voucher for our favourite fabric shop, Arthur Bales, which happened to be having one of its awesome sales, including Liberty fabrics at absurdly low prices. 

Some of my "stash" of Liberty fabrics

I am a great fan of Liberty, as the quality of their merchandise is exceptional and the designs are absolutely beautiful. I have made quite a few garments over the years, including a shirt from a Liberty fabric that is printed with a William Morris design, which I completed last weekend.

A recently completed shirt with a William Morris design
Just as a quirky detail, I snipped the "Morris & Co" tag from the selvage to make a label for this shirt - proof of authenticity! 

Ever since January, my friend and I planned to use her Liberty fabric that she had bought on the sale to make a replica of her favourite skirt, which she had bought in Paris many years ago, and has been mended and adapted several times. She wanted to preserve the skirt, so the easiest way of making a pattern was not really an option, which is to dismantle the garment and trace the pieces. From my experience,  if you try sewing the garment back together, it is often not successful, as the seams will have been trimmed and snipped to optimise the fit when the garment was originally made.

The skirt that would serve as the model
Because this was her favourite skirt, there was a strong likelihood that if we could make a successful replica, we would want to make several more in the future. Usually I use ordinary tracing paper to draft a pattern but these patterns tend to wear out over time, developing small tears and many pinholes in key places, so we decided to use a special tracing "paper" which is more like a very lightweight fabric similar to what medics use as bed protectors for medical examinations. This would allow for many re-uses and would also be easier for a less experienced dressmaker. It is also very easy to draw on with a ballpoint pen.
Tracing "paper" of lightweight fabric.
To trace out the pattern, we laid the skirt flat on a large table, folded in half so that we were only tracing the left-hand side, which we would be placing on the fold of the fabric for the full piece each time. Because the skirt is gathered onto elastic at the waist, I used a sneaky trick that I have developed over the years, which is to pin the garment with the elastic fully stretched onto a bed or couch to get the true shape. For the ruffles on this skirt, we had to use our intuition and my experience to decide whether the true shapes were pure rectangles or slightly tapered, which would affect how much gathering there would be.

As my friend and I have huge respect for Liberty fabric, and conscious of the cost, even though we bought ours on a sale, she had the foresight to get some much less expensive fabric to do a trial run.

The Swheshwe-type fabric for a trial run
As we were tracing off each pattern piece, we made many annotations on the actual tracings - where to place on a fold, where the seams or fold-lines were, how many pieces of fabric to cut for each pattern piece and a "name" for the garment. When you have traced off many garments, it is very easy to mix up pieces from different garments - also if you are making patterns for people of different sizes or for children, it is a good idea to indicate the size. We also were careful to add on seam allowances and extra for the elastic carriage. Next it was time to pin out the pattern pieces onto the trial fabric and cut it out.

The cut out pieces ready to sew
Because it was a first trial, we wrote a couple of notes in the seam allowance so that they would not be visible in the finished garment. This skirt has many gathered pieces, so my friend will be spending this week doing the hand-tacking. She has a wonderful old Singer sewing machine that only does the most basic stitches, and has a crank-handle not an electric motor. This is excellent for an inexperienced dressmaker, and in fact is identical to the one that I was taught to sew on as a child.
The Liberty fabric for the final version
Once we have made the trial skirt, we will see if the pattern pieces need any adapting before making the final skirt. I am sure the trial garment will also help my friend build confidence, as she has only used her machine for the last several decades to do straight seams to finish off some of her photographic works that she has printed on fabric. She will no doubt find the Liberty fabric a pure delight to work with, as do I!



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