Urban Simplicity: Railroad Denim

Saturday, May 28, 2016

Railroad Denim

I cheated a little and pulled out a tshirt and skirt from my summer rotation. We are dealing with the effects a tropical storm in the Atlantic, and the weather is truly nasty right now--low 90s, high humidity, bright and sticky. I just couldn't face anything in my spring rotation today, especially after going to the gym and logging 4 miles.

I made this skirt as a way to test my skirt sloper after I made some changes to it, but have been saving it for summer, and thus haven't blogged it yet. The fabric was part of a Craftsy kit that was on clearance, and I bought it in part because it was so inexpensive ($20 for the fabric and pattern!). I also wanted to try a shaped waistband because I wondered if some of my skirt fitting problems were due to always using a straight waistband. The pattern was a Palmer/Pletsch pattern--McCall's 6361--and intrigued me, because I read their book, Real Fit for Real People, sometime last year.

The kit came, I prewashed and dried the fabric--a railroad striped lightweight denim from Robert Kaufman. It washed up nicely, and I commenced to fiddle with the McCalls 6361. The written length was easily 3" shorter than my skirt preference, so that was the first thing I needed to tackle. I slashed and spread and started filling in the gaps. I got one pattern piece done, and started on the second, and decided to compare the fit and flare of it to my Anne Adams 9481 pattern, that was very close to a perfect fit. The M6361 was way off. At that point, I decided to give up on the pattern, but to apply the shaped waist band to my Anne Adams pattern.

I also decided to redraft my Anne Adams pattern to incorporate all the changes I had been making on the fly. I've been removing all the written seam allowances, and making the seam allowances quite large, as well as tinkering with the length but I wanted something that was consistent. I redrew it all on freezer paper (a lovely invention for sewers, if ever there was!) and decided to use this railway denim as my test project before cutting into my red twill. I figured it wouldn't be a great loss if it ended up not fitting properly. The cutting was a near thing--I must have lost a bit of yardage in the wash, because I had to get pretty creative to get the whole skirt out of it. The McCall's 6361 also had a two-part pocket piece that I wanted to try. I like my Hollyburn all-in-one pocket a lot, but sometimes you need the option to reduce bulk on the pocket bag.

I cut a shaped and straight waist band, just in case the former didn't work out--the straight one was a squeak! I ended up kind of chickening out on the shaped waistband, and went with the straight one in the end. I actually think it was a good call. Taking a wedge out of the back skirt pieces fixed the problem I was having with excess fabric pooling at the base of my spine, and I think I got the seam allowances how I want them on this skirt. I still had to add an extra set of darts in the back, but given my hip to waist ratio, I think that is inevitable for a decent fit.

All in all, a decent skirt! It is lightweight, reasonably comfortable, and I think will be nice for the summer. More importantly, it allowed me to make three other well-fitting skirts that I really like (two that are unblogged) for my summer rotation. (And apologies for the rubbish photos--I usually try to take photos first thing, and going to the gym this morning kind of messed up my schedule. There are a limited number of spots for photos after a certain time in the morning because of the light)