More skirts! Lots of skirts for me these days. I think my unjustified pants sewing fear, combined a plethora of cute skirt pattern releases is keeping me firmly in the skirt camp these days. Also, I am apparently into pairing skirts with this striped Bonnie top... maybe it's time to work on another one of those, too.
This is the Brume by Deer and Doe, a knit pencil skirt with some funky seamlines that I love. The seaming kinda reminds me of a girdle in some ways, but I prefer to think of it as "Batman butt":
My measurements actually put me outside of the size range for this pattern. But having successfully made the largest size in Deer and Doe patterns in the past, I threw caution to the wind and sewed up Brume anyway. The Deer and Doe patterns tend to work for pear shapes and Eleanor even has a full butt adjustment tutorial for Brume on her blog.
I used some black ponte that I got super cheap in Hong Kong, so I figured I would consider this a muslin if my sizing gamble fell flat. Plus my ponte had more than the 30% stretch (more like 40%), which I hoped would help my cause. No sizing problems, in the end, which was quite lucky! The skirt is a bit longer than I anticipated, but that's easily remedied later if I decide to lop off a few inches.
The pattern went together very smoothly. The only place I ran into some trouble was topstitching the yoke seam (the Batman seam)... the pattern calls for topstitching with a twin needle, but here's my question: how are you supposed to topstitch at the two points on the butt where the three pattern pieces meet? You can't exactly put your needle down and pivot with a twin needle. I ended up just sewing all the way to the perpendicular seam, backstitching, cutting the thread and then starting a new stitching line on the other curve. Worked ok, I think... check out my butt:
Next time I make this skirt, I might consider topstitching all of the vertical seams, too, for consistency's sake and because I find fabrics like ponte don't press very crisply, so my un-topstitched seams are not very flat. I may shorten the shirt a few inches, too.
I had to overexpose these photos so you could see the seamlines. I mean, this skirt is all about the seamlines, right? Black is so hard to photograph...
Final verdict on Brume: I'm quite happy it! Lots of potential once I work the little kinks out. I love the potential for colorblocking, like this one at Fifty Two Fancies that I found via Instagram. In the meantime, this one is totally wearable, and maybe even a little bit sexy, methinks.