Embroidered A Line Skirt with Patchwork Detailing

I don't think this is going to make much sense, but hopefully you can figure it out...

Materials needed to make one woman's small A-line skirt

1 yard Linen

1 yard Muslin

1 Moda Charm pack in Santorini

Embroidery floss to match

7-inch zipper

Go through your charm pack and pick out about nine different squares you want to use.

Cut each square in half (they are 5 inches squared to start with, so cut to 2.5 inches)

Arrange in order you like and sew 2.5 " * 5 " strips togther at length

At this point, after making my long strip of pieces, I prewashed everything.  I didn't want to prewash earlier because I didn't want those little squares getting eaten up in my washer or something.  However, I learned that you should probably stay stitch or serge edges of linen before prewashing...

Yikes. 

If you are awesome like me and didn't bother to stay stitch or serge, take some time and detangle and trim off that mess.

Iron patchwork strip, linen and muslin

Much better.

Cut long patchwork strip in half length wise, down to 2.5" wide so that you have two long, skinny strips of patchwork

Set aside.

Draw a skirt-like shape on your linen.  I used a well-fitting, but too short, A-line skirt from my closet.  But really, the shape is so simple that you can use a tailor's tape and figure out the waist and length you want that way, too.

(I swear there's a skirt shape drawing on that fabric)

Fold linen in half and cut out two of the skirt shapes you drew.

Grab your long, skinny patchwork strip and lay it on your cut-out skirt to figure out where you want the strip placement to be.  Account for 1/4inch seams.

Cut a section of your skirt out along the lines that you want the strip to be on both the front and back

Now you're going to do an Open Welt Seam (click for linkage on how to do one) when you attach the strip to the top piece of your skirt and the bottom peice, replacing the linen strip you removed.  Do this on both the front and back.

I used a contrasting thread to highlight the open welt seam even more.

Now you should have two skirt pieces, front and back, that have a strip of patchwork along the bottom somewhere. 

It's time to embroider.

I used a flower from the Moda fabric as my inspiration (I had to put two charms together to get the full flower).  And drew my interpretation onto a piece of paper using a thick, dark marker.

Tape your picture onto a window (unless you have a light box, in which case you can skip this next part until we get to the embroidery.  Lucky you.)

Tape your front skirt piece on top of that, matching to where you want the embroidery to be

Now lightly trace, using a turtle pencil you've held onto since 6th grade, the image onto the front of the skirt panel

Grab your embroidery floss and needle. 

For my flower:

foreground petals-3 strands yellow, 2 strands dark brown, 1 strand pink

background petals-3 strands mustard, 2 strands dark brown, 1 strand pink

leaves/base-3 strands olive green, 3 strands dark brown

stem-6 strands dark brown

Simplely follow your tracing lines with a chain stitch

Admire your flower for a while.

Now, back to skirt construction.

Lay the front (or back, doesn't matter) skirt piece onto the  folded-in-half muslin

Trace the skirt shape, making the lower hem about 1-2 inches shorter than the linen piece. 

This is going to be your lining.

Cut out

Mark 7 inches down on the left side of all four pieces for zipper placement.  I forgot to take a picture, sorry.

Seam the linen sides front and back together, right sides facing, on both the right and left side, but stopping at your 7-inch mark on the left.

Repeat with the muslin.

Turn and hem under bottoms of both skirts. 

Turn skirt right side out, leave lining wrong side out.  This way when the skirt is fully constructed, the finished side of the lining will be against your skin and the "wrong" side against the inside of the skirt.

Pin zipper in place at opening you left when sewing sides, matching ends of zipper binding to top edge of skirts. 

Using a zipper foot, sew in zipper.

Pin and turn under tops of both the skirt and the lining.  Sew, finishing top together so that it's now all one skirt.

Here is where I stopped at first.  And my skirt didn't really fit so well at all. You can see, it looked more like a pillowcase than a fitted skirt

So I went back and put in four darts, two in front and two in back...

Put skirt on your body and mark dart placements.  Or you could measure.  I measured with the front darts, put on for the back.  Putting the garment on ended up working out better for me. 

I put my front darts too close together.  I should have put them where my hip bones are.  The back darts I got right, just up from the center of each of the bum cheeks :)

I made my darts about 1 inch across, and 2 inches down. 

Sew and press toward center

And now the skirt fits perfectly.  And looks much more A-line.

Front

Back