Tribute to an Old Piano Teacher and a Best Friend

I love pencil skirts, but since having a baby, I've found that most of my old pencil skirts don't fit quite right anymore (having a baby was definitely one of the biggest, but best, life changes I've experienced :)  Anyway, I had this fabric that I bought from Fabric.com a couple years ago when they had a huge amount of Vera Wang fabrics for sale.  At one point, all the Vera Wang fabric clearanced for $1.95/yard, which was awesome.  I bought a lot of incredible fabric for an even more incredible price, and this was one of the pieces.  It's been sitting patiently in my stash wanting to be a pencil skirt for a very long time, and I figured it was time to make its dreams come true :).

When I showed this skirt to my little sister, she said it looked like a skirt that our old piano teacher would wear, just in a different color, but she liked it anyway.  I'll just consider it a tribute to her :)

I have a wonderful friend named Holly.  We were roomates in college, and other than my family, she is my best friend.  She's gorgeous and amazing and a true friend.  She came to visit me about a month ago, and mentioned she liked a pencil skirt she saw in a magazine picture.  I told her I'd make one for her birthday and I knew this was the perfect fabric to make it from.  It's not going to get to her by her birthday, but hopefully she'll like it enough to forgive me for that.  Holly's skirt and my skirt are identical, except Holly's is longer, because she doesn't have short Shetland pony legs like me :)

The fabric is a mustard yellow wool-blend glenplaid weave.  It was great to work with.  I really love sewing with wool.  It moulds so nicely and is very forgiving of mistakes.  I pressed everything from the wrong side, so I didn't leave any iron marks.  It may be hard to see from the picture, but the fabric has a little bit of a pile in the darker checks.  It makes it feel kind of velvety, but it also is prone to crushing if you're not careful ironing it.  The pattern I used was Burda 8155.  It's a basic pencil skirt with back zipper and straight waistband.  The pattern originally had a slit, but I don't like slits in skirts, so I changed it to a vent.  It also was not lined, but I added a chocolate brown lining (Holly picked the lining color, and it looks great).

I used dark brown leather button for the back.  I know it doesn't match, but I like how it looks with the fabric and skirt style.  I also did a lapped zipper instead of a center back zipper, because I like how they look better.  I used a method from Threads magazine, Issue #134.  It's a great way of putting lapped zippers in and if you can find that issue, I'd highly recommend checking it out.

All in all, I'm pretty happy with how the skirts turned out, even if they do look like my old piano teacher's skirts :)  I got 2 skirts out of 1 1/2 yards of designer fabric for a total cost of about $7.00 for both skirts, including lining, button and zipper!  Not too shabby...

Maybe Holly will send me a picture of her in the skirt when she gets it and I'll post it if she does.