I pay attention to runway fashion shows because it’s a great source of inspiration. Resort 2015 wrapped up recently, and I’ve made a couple of items inspired by pieces I saw there. The first I’ll show you came from Emmanuel Ungaro’s collection (photo courtesy of Vogue.com).
I noticed two things right away about this skirt. First,the skirt is not a mini and it has a flounce at the knee. I just happen to have a pattern like that, and I think flounced skirts are a good summer option, a little casual, a little playful. So right away, I started thinking about a riff on this skirt.
The second thing I noticed was the print — white daisies on a blue background. Fausto Puglisi, the new Ungaro designer, also used a similar print in black daisies on a white background. He’s also continuing the Ungaro tradition of mixed prints, which is not something I wear but it intrigues me. Here is some of the black daisy print.
Mixed with zebra print — there was a lot of animal and floral mixing in this set. But I really liked the mood of the daisy print, so I made a flounced skirt in the spirit of the flounced skirt above, but in the black and white palette.
I didn’t have enough fabric to add a waterfall flounce down the front, but the hem is flounced and the length is just below the knee. It’s a lightweight cotton, so I underlined it with some plain white cotton shirting that I keep in my stash for just such needs. I use Simplicity 1807 as my base pattern, but I modified it. I started with view A, the shorter view, and I removed three inches at the waistband seam. Then I added four darts, two front and two back, to taper the hip area to the waistband. This removed some of the extra fullness at the hips but left enough for the elastic and drawstring waistband to gather slightly. This also shortened the skirt without requiring me to redraft the flounce — this waist modification was definitely easier than redrafting the flounce would have been. The flounce came from view B-C (the midi lengths), and I did have to remove about 4″ in width to fit this flounce to the view A knee-length hem, but that did not compromise the shape of the flounce. I ended up with a shape that approximates the inspiration piece but is not an exact clone. I’m happy with it.
My Sewing Pattern Review can be found here.
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