Handmade Floral Viscose Skirt with Split

This make is very much all about the fabric! Since making my floral viscose Shelby Dress I have been slightly obsessed with viscose. It's just the perfect fabric for summer, especially for summer skirts and dresses as it has such a lovely drape to it. I really love the current trend for ditsy floral viscose fabrics and was on the hunt for one to make myself a skirt. 

I found the perfect fabric at Fabrics For All who have a wonderful selection of viscose fabrics, and while I hesitated over which one to get I kept coming back to this one.

There are a lot of floral viscose fabrics around at the moment but what I love about this one is that it's slightly different from the classic white on navy/black background. I wouldn't usually choose a green fabric but somehow this colour just works so well with the white petals and splashes of pink. 

I've had the idea for this skirt in my head for a while so I knew exactly what to make out of the fabric when it arrived. This is a style which is a bit out of my comfort zone as I tend to stick to above-the-knee skirts, but I kept seeing skirts like this one on the high street and really loving them. The common theme seemed to be a below-the-knee length (so not quite midi-length) with a split up the side. My favourite RTW skirt that I found which matches this design is this one, but why buy it when you can make it yourself?!

I spent a really long time (as in, way too long!) deciding on the exact style of this skirt. I've seen so many variations with elastic waists, with or without splits, the split in the side-seam, the skirt flaring out...etc that it was hard to choose the exact features that I wanted to include. I decided that I wanted the skirt to have a zip rather than an elasticated waist and for the slit to be on the 3/4 of the way across the front skirt rather than in the side seam. I spent a long time deciding whether or not to include a panel on both sides of the centre front but eventually decided to only have an extra panel on the side with the slit. I'm so pleased I made that decision as it makes the front a lot smoother.

I was going to draft the pattern myself by creating a kind of trapezium shape that came in at the waist. Then, on a genius (if I may say so myself!) spur of the moment idea, I realised that I could use the skirt of my prom dress pattern to make it! To make my prom dress I used Simplicity 8330. Looking at that pattern you can see that the skirt is quite different from the skirt that I've made here. It was, however, the perfect base pattern to hack. It's a fitted skirt with darts at the back and front and on top of that, I'd already hacked it to add in a split when I made my prom dress.

The only difference between this skirt and the skirt of my prom dress is that this one doesn't have that extra panel in the front (it also has the zip in the side-seam but that's not a very obvious difference). I honestly confused myself a fair bit when cutting out the front pattern pieces as it involved some fairly inaccurate pinning of pattern pieces on top of each other and fabric flipping, but the point is that the pattern was perfect in the end!

In order to get the fitted look that I wanted I chose to finish the skirt with an invisible zip which I put into the side-seam. I'm pretty pleased with how invisible it is! I chose this dark grey zip which I think goes nicely with the fabric. To avoid breaking up the print I cut the back skirt pieces on the fold and inserted the zip in the side seam rather than the centre back.

I'm especially pleased with the fit that I managed to achieve on this skirt, mainly thanks to the darts. The only problem with a skirt like this one is that there is no give in it, meaning that once zipped up it has to fit perfectly at the waist. I was nervous about making it too small and actually ended up making it a little bit big, so had to go back and take it in by 2cm at the side seam. It's still a little loose but that's definitely preferable to it being too tight!

I finished the waist with a bias binding that I folded over and topstitched down. It's such a lovely neat finish and gives the skirt a special touch.

I really love this skirt and I'm also really proud of how well it fits. It turned out exactly as I hoped it would and I can't wait to wear it when the weather warms up a bit. 

This fabric was gifted to me by Fabrics For All as part of their blogging team, but all thoughts and opinions are my own.