Asymmetrical skirt

This is Vogue 7856, which is an asymmetrical skirt. It's supposed to look like that!

It is flows in interesting ways which is rather hard to show on a non-video blog, but here are three views to make up for it.

I thought this would take much longer to make than it did, because it has quite a lot of pieces at interesting angles, but actually the cutting out was the trickiest part with the large pieces cut on the bias meaning I had to move James into the kitchen cupboard in order to make room on the floor.

I followed zipper installation guidelines from www.fashion-incubator.com, although I didn't follow them as far as the order of stitching the facing in. It would have been easier and worked better if I had. I also have the zipper just a little bit too high, making the hook and eye a little crowded with the top of the zipper. I also hand stitched rather than top stitched the zipper because the fabric changes colour halfway down the zip (red to yellow) and I only had one colour of thread (red), so I wanted the stitching to not be visible.

I used the clever idea someone on one of my reviews suggested for sewing very fine fabric with a zig-zag stitch, which is to lay newspaper underneath the fabric while stitching. This worked extremely well, although removing the newspaper was a bit of a pain. Without the newspaper, the zig-zag stitch pulls the fabric quite badly, no matter what tension setting is used.

I used dupioni silk in 4 different colours from fabric.com. I cold pre-washed the fabric, which makes it much softer and with a more gentle sheen, and this also means I wont have to get the skirt dry cleaned.

I made size 12, and this is probably slightly too big, but the advantage is that the skirt sits well below my waist. I find skirts that do up below the waist much more comfortable. The flip side is that the skirt probably hangs a little low. I also am shorter than the pattern assumed 5'6". I didn't make any length alteration, which perhaps I should have, but luckily the lowest corner of the hem does not touch the ground. The highest part of the hem is above my knee - the hem really is very uneven! I straightened the curve from the waist to the hips since I am not curved like real women are.

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