Simplicity 4237 Bubble skirt – Part 1

by Diva Gigi 

As I mentioned on My Blog, I’ve never really been fond of bubble skirts. The dress on The Sartorialist made me think again. So, last week, I picked up this Simplicity pattern to get me started:

The first thing I wanted to do was remove the gathering below the waistband. To do this, I slashed the skirt pattern in three places –
to, but not through, the seamline at the hem. I then snipped from the cutting line to the hem marking to make a small paper hinge. If you slash all the way through you will, of course, shorten the seamline – which you don’t want.

After comparing the skirt pattern to the lining pattern I knew I needed to remove 6″ at the waistband seam. Since this piece represents 1/4th of the garment, I’ll be removing 24″ at the seamline – a lot of gathers! This meant overlapping each slash 2″.

Here you can see that the skirt and lining match up at the waistband seam. The skirt is then gathered at the bottom to match the lining. The shorter lining causes the bubbling.