Vogue 7375 - 1952 Construction

The skirt is very straight forward to put together. All the seams are straight stitching. It will be the finishing details that make the garment. The back seam, which has the zipper closure at the top, I have pressed open and have finished the edges with a Hong Kong finish. This first photo is the bias strip applied to one side of the seam. 

 Here, I roll the bias around the edge of the seam allowance and finger press it open. I pin the bias in place and  I will stitch in the ditch to secure the bias to the back side of the seam allowance. Since it's bias cut no further finishing is needed and the gingham will not ravel.

 Next I basted the zipper in place, before machine stitching the zipper. I prefer to take this extra step. It allows me to make small adjustments and if I don't like the zipper placement. The hand basting is a flash to remove, not so when it is machine stitched. I also find that the pins just don't hold things securely enough.

 Hand basting helps me to achieve good results most of the time, especially when dealing with matching plaids. The other two skirt seams were done with quarter inch french seams. I don't have photos because I became so engrossed in my work that I forgot to take the pictures.

 I did make a bound button hole for this garment, butttttt.....I had to remove it because shortly after this garment was completed I went on a diet and succeeded. Two inches disappeared from my waistline and the fastest way to remove them from my skirt was to open the back waistband seam and adjust an inch on each side. Looking back on this, the bound button hole is a nice teaching point for VoNBBS, but I think the machine stitched buttonhole will hold up better particularly because waistbands can be a source of stretch and strain for many woman. (Note: Including me....especially including me.)Two lines of gathering stitches and many pins secured the waistband to the skirt body for basting.

For the hem. I used a satin ribbon hem tape and some careful hand stitches. My hem was slightly over three inches deep. I cut the skirt so that the hem line would fall on a black horizontal stripe and I rolled about a quarter of the stripe to the back in the hem. If I hemmed either on the exactly the line between the horizontal stripes or on a white stripe I felt any small lack of accuracy would be noticed. The black stripe seemed to minimize these errors.