Presenting: orange cashmere skirt

A somewhat prosaic title - but so long awaited!  The Sewing Lawyer finally finished her multi-seamed plush orange cashmere skirt, designed for Vogue (#1324) by Donna Karan.

Behold:

Here, I'm wearing it with the recently-completed cowl neck top from Burda 09/2012, which has turned out to be a very versatile and much-worn item.  Too bad it's made from that pilly rayon knit which won't survive washing very many times.

A confession - when I made the top, it was pairing with this skirt I had in mind.  I think they look pretty good together.

From the full-length picture at left, I hear you think "ho hum:  another pencil skirt".

Closer up, however, check out the construction detail and topstitching! The consensus here and IRL was that I should accentuate the positive by adding topstitching at the darts and waistband, so I did.  Even though I had already attached the zipper, which made it a bit tricky.

I have worn the skirt - it's narrow but not uncomfortable although one must take little, ladylike strides in it.

Aside from the fitting adjustments already chronicled here and the endless testing of said fitting adjustments in muslin (twice) mentioned here, what else to tell you?  Let me see....

Well, this plush fabric is, I am pretty sure, a wool and cashmere blend.  It is thick enough to be a decent coat, but I only had one metre.  This because my husband found the fabric at our local thrift store for (drummmmmmrolll) $1.99.  Despite its provenance and price, this lush find languished in The Sewing Lawyer's stash for a couple of years while she came to terms with the fact that (a) the only upper body garment that could be made from it would be a vest, which due to its colour would only look right if worn in the forest with a hunting rifle and (b) it was not "too good" to be sewn and (c) there was enough for an orange pencil skirt which could be pretty interesting.

The skirt is underlined with silk organza and lined with hot pink mystery lining from stash.  I used this technique to line around the vent.  

 I made little thread chain connectors to keep the lining from peeking out below the hem of the skirt when I sit down, but need to re-do them because they are the wrong length and/or attached in the wrong place, and so allow the lining to peek out about .75cm, which is sort of cute but also annoying.

The zipper in this skirt is inserted after the entire garment is sewn, and it's installed up to the top of the back waistband.  A regular skirt-length zipper would be too short so I used a dress-length one, from stash.  I first tried using an extra-long zipper in my black high-waisted skirt and it is so much easier to get in and out of.  In this skirt the zipper opening is probably 30cm (12").

Finally, and just to prove that experience is no guarantee that no sewing mistakes will be made, I will confess that I had the entire skirt finished and put it on, only to realize that there was a very obvious problem at the top of the back vent - a drag line indicating that something was out of whack.  It took me quite a long time, after totally un-sewing the back vent, CB seam and lining, to realize that in sewing the CB seam below the zipper, I had eased more fabric into the underlap side, which released just at that point and created a big bubble of fabric.