A Bird For a Skirt: Day 3

I made a TON of progress on the skirt over the weekend. If you missed the first two posts about the skirt, you can view them here and here.

When we last left off, I had just finished the pleats on the skirt front (step 3).

Steps 4 - 6: Pockets!
When you cut out a pattern, your fabric is typically folded in half so you're cutting through two layers of fabric and end up with two of each pattern piece. When I unpinned the pocket facing from the pattern piece, I noticed the fabric must not have been lined up properly because the bottom facing piece looked like this:

so I re-pinned the pattern to some of the leftover fabric...

...and cut out another pocket facing...

then I pinned the pocket facings to the skirt front.

Once the facings were attached, I stitched the pockets to the pocket facings.

You can really see the pockets starting to form here.

Steps 7 - 9: Skirt Back
I stitched the two back sections together, leaving the top section unstitched in preparation for adding the zipper.

You can see in the photo above that I also created the pleats for the back of the skirt.

Steps 10 - 18: Yoke and Zipper
Then I added the yoke, which is basically the waist band and its lining. It consists of one long strip for the front and two smaller pieces, which will be separated by the zipper, for the back. I cut two of each piece for a total of six pieces or two sets of three.

On one set I applied fusible interfacing to the wrong side of the fabric. If you look closely you can see it in the photo above. I cut it about a half an inch smaller than the fabric. 

Fusible interfacing gives fabric some heft, which is perfect for a waste band. It has two sides, a smooth side and a rougher side, which is the side with the "glue" that sticks to the fabric once you iron it. 

You cut out the shape you need, lay it (rough side down) on the wrong side of your fabric, place a damp cloth on top and set an iron over the cloth for about fifteen seconds.  Then move on to the next section until all interfacing is fused to the fabric.

Once the interfacing had been applied, I stitched the two yokes together (fused and unfused). 

Here's the waist band after I attached it to the skirt.

After that I added the zipper. Sorry, I forgot to take pictures. Got a bit distracted by sewing (go figure). After that, all I had to do was add the bottom brown fabric band to the main skirt body. 

Steps 19 - 22 Finishing (A.K.A. Add band of brown fabric)

Barbie had requested that I add some red rick rack between the skirt and the bottom band, so I stitched that onto the skirt first and then added the brown band.

Stay tuned for the big reveal tomorrow!