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Allergic to Simple

Maybe not allergic, exactly, but I do gravitate to way-more-complicated-than-entirely-necessary. And that's definitely the case with this skirt pattern, which features all kinds of fiddly bits I'm figuring out as I go along, because I've never made something like this before.

A pag of a small, spiral-bound sketchbook, showing black ink drawing of an A-line skirt with pleated panels beneath each pocket, an exploded diagram of the component pieces, and a number of rows of width measurements for each section, with length measurements to the side.
I basically grew up on those exploded diagrams you get with k'nex and lego sets, and that's still how I think about constructing any three-dimensional object.
So, I've been wanting to make a few cool-weather skirts from the wool yardage left after making K's hosen and my red hosen, and I have just short of a yard of 60" fabric from each. Plenty for a knee-length skirt for me, or even longer, if I do a simple pattern. If. That was the plan until I started sketching, and then I thought, well, I should go ahead and mock this up, just to see if my pattern pieces will even go together to make the correct shape, and then I'll know how many and what sizes I need, and I can lay out the pieces to see if they'll fit on the fabric I have to work with. (They won't. I am 98.4% certain they won't. But I'm gonna try anyway.)

A photo from above of a being, long-sleeved and full-skirted chemise, very wrinkled and with the skirt spread to make space for a rectangular paper pattern piece, placed near the hem. A pile of folded comforter and jeans fills the upper left corner of the photo, and the edge of a pile of cardboard boxes peeps in the upper right corner.
Pro tip: don't use that Joann's "linen-look" stuff for undergarments. Just buy cotton.
Also, it was the excuse I've been waiting for to chop up my first-ever SCA chemise, which has been taking up space in my scrap fabric bin for years now.

(Look. Look. Stop screaming for a moment. It's made of very very terrible cotton-poly fabric that doesn't breathe worth shit, it looks horribly dirty next to everything in the world, I have three (3) linen chemises now, and furthermore: it's mine, I created it, I am its alpha and its omega.)

A white woman with long, braided red hair, facing away from the camera with arms akimbo and framed by a dark doorway. She's wearing a black shirt and long gathered denim skirt, with the shreds of the beige chemise over all. The sleeves are intact, but only a ragged eight inches of waist and a few trailing scraps fall down over her skirt. Brown leather body armour hangs on a closed wooden folding chair leaning on the wall to her right, under a large poster of Alphonse Mucha's 'The Moon.' To her left, a castle-style spinning wheel in light nautral wood peeps in, and a large handsaw and several metal rulers hang from a nail next to the light switch. A large watercolor painting of a pink rose is above these, and above that a gold-bordered piece of calligraphy, and a small black-and-white print of characters from Ursula Vernon's 'Digger.'
#stylish
Besides, now I have a sexy outfit for the next zombie walk.

A roughly-oval piece of beige fabric with a large seam allowance and seam lines marked in black sharpie, with a roughly-trapezoidal piece of beige fabric pinned face-down to the upper edge, arranged on the photographer's lap, who is wearing a gathered denim skirt and a bulky honeycomb-cabled forest-green sweater. A red bluetooth speaker is sitting in a white ceramic bowl on the floor at the photographer's feet. (That's not super relevant, I just wanted to tell you.)
I really should have noted exactly which way to seam all the pocket pieces so they'd line up right.
I wanted to try fancy slash pockets, instead of the side seam pockets I've been adding to all my other skirts, so I started with the pocket mockups. It probably would have been smart of me to mark the "right" and "wrong" sides of the fabric before I started construction, just to make my records of the process more useful to future-Sabine...but instead, I'll be pinning the pocket pieces this way and that on the final garment, too.

The tricky thing is getting the seams on the correct faces—all three seams involved in making this type of pocket should end up on the outside of the pocket, but the top-front piece (the top pinned piece above, and the folded-over piece below) folds down to conceal the seam between it and the bottom-front of the pocket, and that one little detail just melts my brain.

A beige roughly-oval pocket, with seam lines marked in black sharpie and large seam allowances, sitting on the photographer's lap, with the top half of Salman Rushdie's book 'Shalimar the Clown' showing over the front edge.
Now you see it...
A beige roughly-oval pocket, with seam lines marked in black sharpie and large seam allowances, sitting on the photographer's lap, with less than an inch of Salman Rushdie's book 'Shalimar the Clown' showing over the front edge.
...and now you don't.
















I did eventually get everything facing the right way (mostly) after a few tries, and was deeply satisfied to discover that not only would these pockets fit my phone and keys easily, I can stash an entire trade paperback in them without trouble (and my keys and phone would still fit).

A beige rectangle of fabric with the edges marked with black sharpie and large seam allowances left outside the marks, with four very wobbly inch-deep pleats pressed into it. A single silver pin holds each end of each pleat down.
Okay, so they're not straight pleats. Picky, picky.
After the pockets, I thought I'd tackle the pleated panels, which surely wouldn't be all that difficult.

Uh.

I'm the last person to claim that I'm a talented person with an iron, but my first attempt at neat little pleats was pret-ty abysmal. I thought I could get away with only marking and pinning the top and bottom of the pleats, and I'd just pull the fabric taut across the grain and press it in place to set the pleats. Clearly, that didn't work...and this fabric is stretchier than I remember, so pulling it taut was out of the question.

A beige rectangle of fabric with the edges marked with black sharpie and large seam allowances left outside the marks, with two pleats very neatly arranged and pinned across the edge of the pleat about every half inch, and two more pleats marked in black sharpie with dashed lines for the under fold and a solid line for the visible edge. The lower edge of the fabric is still creased in wavy lines from the first attempt at pleats. The pile of sewing supplies on the couch, just visible, includes large silver shears, their black plastic sheath, a spool of red thread.
It would have been wise to iron this piece completely flat before fixing those pleats, yes.
So I broke out the yardstick and the sharpie to mark every single pleat on each of four panels, and pinned the daylights out of each one before I ironed them. I think, should I by some miracle have enough wool to pull this skirt pattern off, I'll topstitch the pleats just where they crease, to encourage them to lie nicely while letting them open as far as possible when I move.

A beige rectangle of fabric with the edges marked with black sharpie and large seam allowances left outside the marks, with four straight pleats pinned across the edges about every half inch. The pleats are neat at the edges, but heavily puckered between the pins. The pile of sewing supplies on the couch, just visible, has grown to large silver shears, their black plastic sheath, a spool of red thread, and an uncoiled pink measuring tape.
It's such a good thing I have scads of pins.
This fabric, for all its many (many) faults, presses rather well, so I got to transform this puckered mess into a reasonably well-behaved panel.

A beige rectangle of fabric with the edges marked with black sharpie and large seam allowances left outside the marks, with four straight pleats pinned across the edges about every half inch. The pins make only slight indents in the otherwise very flat fabric. Only the measuring tape is visible in the background.
Be. Flat.
I left the pins in for most of the sewing, partly out of laziness and partly because I wasn't sure how much handling they'd take before softening up again, and I wasn't going to do the topstitching for the mockup. That is firmly in the Too Much Work category.

A beige half-skirt, with seam lines marked in black sharpie and large seam allowances, showing the rectangular pocket panels with pinned, pleated panels below, and plain panels between and to either side of the pockets. The plain panels extend well past the tops of the pleated/pocket panels, flopping over an undulating pink-and-navy log cabin quilt strip on the table.
Hmmmm.
There was...an odd happenstance when I started pinning the long, plain panels to the pleated panels, though. They should have matched in length, and instead, I have about five inches to spare at the tops of the plain panels. Because it's me, I just kept sewing (also, the machine lives at a friend's house, and I actively wanted to minimize handsewing with this fabric. I'd forgotten how little fun it is to work with high-polyester blends) and figured I'd solve the mystery later.

A beige half-skirt propped against purple fabric organizer cubes, with seam lines marked in black sharpie and large seam allowances, showing the rectangular back panels with pleated panels below, and plain panels between and to either side of the pockets. The center plain panel sticks straight up from the waist edge, while the edge plain panels are tucked behind the skirt.
Something's gone awry here.
 Much later, it occurred to me that when I'd laid out the pocket panels on the fabric, I hadn't added the length to make up the difference between mid-hip, where I wanted the slash to open, and my actual waist, where I was trying to place the waistband. So I have a mockup of a mid-rise skirt right now, and I'm still deciding whether to add in the missing fabric to test it as a high-waisted skirt instead.

I probably will. That was...at least a third of the point of this exercise. Also, cute though the skirt is now, I expect I'll get more use out of it with a higher waistband.

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