Silk Skirt Reveal

Ta da!!! I *finally* finished the blue silk skirt for my friend. I don't have a picture of her modelling it 'cuz she lives up in Paris and I haven't given it to her yet, but here it is on my sewing space/dining room table:

Okay, my gathers are not evenly spaced, but that's the best I could do. I went back and re-spaced them, but they still bunched up in the middle.

Here's a back shot; you can see I chose a pink invisible zipper to match the warp thread:

A close-up on the back vent:

As far as the pattern goes, I'm happy with it. The instructions were good and I think it was easy to put together. The only difficulties I had were in adapting the pattern to use with a lining (odd that it is not lined though...this kind of skirt really needs either a slip or a lining) OR working with the silk OR my machine and my pinking shears eating the fabric.

I didn't insert the lining in the best way possible, but it's an improvement over my red cotton trial version. The silk is so delicate though that I can see the zipper is already stressing it out. I'll have to tell my friend to be careful with the zipper.

The silk frayed like crazy; I guess this was to be expected. But my machine was behaving itself up until the last day of sewing. Luckily, at that point, I was finished with the fashion fabric and was only working with the lining. But my machine (and my pinking shears, which I think I need to replace) did eat up some of the lining fabric. Hence, you can see here that one part is shorter than the other because I had to compensate:

It's on the inside so I'm not going to worry about it!

My original plan was to keep the selvedge for the hem line, but because of the pattern having a round hem and not a straight hem, I couldn't do that. What I did do though was to cut off the selvedge and use it as hem binding, which I then rolled to the inside. It wasn't pretty enough to keep it on the outside there.

However, I did keep it on the outside at the waist band. I like the effect it has there - a slightly more rigorous trim that provides an interplay for the classy, shiny silk. And of course it picks up the pink threads showing throughout the fabric.

Here's a shot of the pocket. I used the same fabric inside:

All in all, I think the pattern and the fabric go well together. But the fabric is definitely not hard-wearing. I think because of that it's more of an 'upon occasion' skirt than an everyday skirt.