From dress to skirt

In March, I made two more sardines and this skirt, the Henry Skirt by Daughter Judy. My scrap fabric pile is shrinking, but there will be more sardines in my future still. It took awhile to get going on this skirt because it started off as a dress I didn’t enjoy wearing. I didn’t take a picture of the dress, but it was a NPL dress from Sarah’s collection (which looks so cute on her, but I felt like I was drowning in fabric whenever I wore it).

I considered making shorts, but a better use of fabric was to make a skort or a skirt. I thought about the Peppermint Magazine wrap skirt, and the Common Stitch wrap skirt. But, I’ve never really liked the tie closure on most wrap skirts.

So, I went with the Henry Skirt because it is stepped into and then has two closures (a button and hole; and a eye & hook) to cinch the skirt and create the wrap look.

Overall, I think this skirt is cute though the fit is just okay. This skirt sits very high, like 2” above the belly button—which is sorta the old school, actual waist that clothes use to be designed to. I will probably take this skirt to Mexico City at the end of May when we visit. Next, I’m starting on a linen trench coat for spring and it’s a piece I might also pack for the trip. I’m using the same Daughter Judy pattern, the Thompson Coat, that I used to make my waxed canvas jacket. The linen trench might be simpler, no lining, just bias tape for the seams.

Pattern: Daughter Judy - Henry Skirt

Size: Medium

Fabric: Gingham Linen (reclaimed from a NPL dress I didn’t wear)

Modifications: Shortened length to 25” to work with the size of my reclaimed fabric. Cut Piece 2 out with an additional seam to get the angled right edge to fit on the fabric.

Overall, I found this pattern … frustrating. This is the second pattern I’ve sewn by Daughter Judy and so I was sort of prepared for the experience. The instructions and diagrams are not sparse, but they don’t hold your hand. It’d be great if there was a diagram of the full skirt open so you could see the closures with the labelled pattern pieces. I didn’t find it intuitive how the three waistband pieces connected with the two skirt pieces.

My other issue was sizing. I am between a small and a large based on my hip and waist measurements. So, I went with medium because the instructions say to choose by your hip size and to adjust the darts. But, that doesn’t really work because if the finished waist measurement doesn’t work for you—there’s no way to adjust other than have the skirt not wrap/fold over as much which is a weird look. Otherwise, you’d have to start over with the next size up’s waistband. It also follows that you can only adjust the darts so much in either direction, as they still have to be the same total width as the waistband to sew the two together.

I’m not sure what a good approach would be to grade between waist and hip sizes on this pattern. Maybe just size up.