This skirt was made as my 2020 “Back to school,” skirt. The pattern is an 1893 one from a drafting manual. It consists of one front piece and two very large back pieces. I wanted this skirt to be a more “casual” Victorian skirt so I decided to make it with a cotton fabric.
The skirt was constructed with french seams to hide the raw edges in case I want to wash it. The front is shaped with four darts on each side and the back is gathered into the waistband.
The right side has a pocket sewn into the side seam, and the pocket pattern is from Bertha Banners Household Sewing with Home Dressmaking, which can be found on Google Books.
I initially bought two yards for the skirt but that ended up only being enough for the front panel and one back panel. However when I went back to get more several months later the same fabric was there but with cooler colors instead. This probably has to do with the different batches of fabric having different dyes. To fix this problem I gave the fabric a tea-bath to warm up the colors. You can still tell that they are not the same but it is close enough that I am not bothered by it.
The bottom eleven inches have a stiff cotton facing to hold out the skirt. To prevent a line from showing where the facing ends, I took only one thread from the fabric at a time while I was sewing.
The tape was added to prevent wear on the hem since it extends a sixteenth of an inch past the actual hem line. With that the skirt was complete.