Built by Wendy Skirt (again)

Since I am STILL waiting for my fabric from FFC for my vintage dress pattern, I took on a repair project. I ordered that fabric on 10/28. It's been 3 weeks! Has anyone else had this problem with FFC? In the past two weeks I must have ordered 4 or 5 other fabrics, just so I'm never sitting waiting without fabric for a project. :(

I made this skirt several months ago from a stretch tweed I bought at FFC for $1.99/yard. It is the skirt pattern from Sew U by Built by Wendy. I had a really tough time binding the pockets. So much so that afterward I bound the hem with inch-wide binding rather than 1/4 inch. Even so, I only wore the skirt once before the ragged edges poked through the bound edge at the pockets. The edges were bound in stretch denim left over from...well let's just say that skinny jeans + muscular thighs + squatting = about a yard of denim for small sewing projects. I ripped 'em wide open from seam to seam. Thank goddess I was home and not out in public! (*shudder*)



Anyhow, now that my serger is up and running, I decided to remove the pocket binding, serge those tricky unravelling edges and rebind. I also serged the side seams because I never got around to finishing the seam allowances. The skirt looks much better now. Although I think it looks weird with the wide binding at the seam and narrow at the pockets. I thought about redoing that too, but the skirt never fit all that well to start with. Either the waist is too high, or it's too small. It would be okay except that the pockets are quite high. They are really unusable where they are. If the skirt sat low on my hips they'd be perfect. I'm glad I did this exercise but I have enough of the fabric left over to redo the skirt from scratch. This time I'll go up a size and maybe I'll bind the edges with red.



I have to say I'm not a huge fan of the Sew U book. I like the clothes a lot, but the instructions are not easy to follow. They are not linear. Wendy jumps around describing how to do certain things at the beginning of the book, other things several chapters later. The book is not a good place for a beginning sewer to start. Now that it's been several months I might go back to it. The pants pattern included in the book is really, really cute. But that is a project for another day. I have at least three on the to-do list before I even think about pants.