Gathered Pencil Skirt

 I am so excited about this skirt! I spent Saturday night making a skirt I found the tutorial for on pinterest. It turned out pretty cute, but I knew I could make one even cuter. And I was surprised with how easy it was.

I started with some measurements. I measured around the my waist where I wanted the skirt to hit. My measurement was 30". I then divided that number by 4 and multiplied that number by 3. Or in my case, 30 divided by four is 7.5, and multiplied by three is 22.5". Add a half an inch for seam allowance. So I cut two pieces that were 23" by about 26". I made them extra long because I wanted to try the skirt on before deciding where to hem the bottom.

I took one of the pieces and cut it in half vertically. Making a 23"x26" piece, and two 11.5" by26" pieces.

I also cut three pieces for the band. One at 16"x6", and two at 8"x6".



 Take your three band pieces and sew/serge them together. Making sure that your longer piece (16") is in the middle of the two shorter pieces (8").

Iron your long piece of material with wrong sides together, hot dog style. 

Next grab your skirt pieces. Set your machine to the longest stitch length or a gathering stitch. My machine goes to a five. 

Run a gathering stitch along the top of your three skirt pieces. 

Gather your skirt pieces until they are the same length as each of your waist band sections.



Once all three pieces are gathered to the correct length, sew/serge the panels together, making sure that once again your larger piece is in the middle.

Once all three panels are sewn together it should look like this. It should also line up pretty dang close to the waist band.

Open your band up and pin it to the top, gathered part of the skirt. Making sure to line up the seems.

Sew the two pieces together. If you look at the picture above you will see that the band and skirt are now sewn together, but the band is still open, not folded closed.

After this step, I quickly serged around all four sides so I wouldn't have to later.

Fold your skirt in half, right sides together and sew up the two sides. Do NOT serge this part. If you notice in the pictures my ends are already serged. This is to help with installing the zipper.

Iron open the seam in the back. These zipper instructions are great! Just make sure to line to top of the zipper with the fold of the band. Do NOT go past that fold. So follow those instructions and meet me back here!

That wasn't so hard right? Fold the band to the inside of the skirt and pin. The band should fold right over the raw edges of the band/skirt seam. Pin the band to make it easier to top stitch.

Top stitch close to the seam to secure the band.

Sorry for the sideways picture! Fixed it! Try your skirt on and decide exactly where to hem to bottom. I made mine a large hem. Like four inches. Finish your hem and try it on!