Finished Project: SBCC 320 - Julep Skirt (and another Tonic Tee)

After the fiddliness (is that a word) of my StyleArc Amber top, I needed an easy project to get my sewjo flowing again. Around this time last week, we were hit with a wave of warm weather (80 degrees is a heat wave in Seattle terms), and I realized that I had a serious lack of summery skirts in my wardrobe. I also felt like I was just about the only woman on my tech company's campus NOT wearing a dress or skirt with a hi-lo hem during those couple of sunny days. I've also been so enamored with my various versions of the SBCC Tonic Tee that I'd really been wanting to try a few other SBCC patterns.

I decided to kill two birds with one stone and sew up an easy skirt with a hi-lo hem. Enter the SBCC Julep skirt:

SBCC Julep Skirt line drawing

Now, I know that there are Big 4 versions of this skirt out there that I could have picked up at a $0.99 or $1.99 sale, but given the shape of the skirt, I was more than happy to pay a few more dollars to not have to worry about where I'd need to shorten the skirt for my 5'2" frame. I also made a coordinating Tonic Tee to go with my new skirt:

Julep skirt + Tonic tee

I hadn't seen any photos of this skirt on a "real" person yet, so if you're having trouble telling where the skirt hits, the front of the skirt hem hits me just below the knee, and the back of the skirt hem hits at about mid-to-upper-mid-calf.

Hello swayback! I really need to add a CB seam to the Tonic Tee pattern.

The skirt does have a center back (CB) seam, which isn't reflected in the line drawing. The CB seam adds some shaping and also gives the skirt a little "kick" at the bottom back hem, which you can't really see in my busy print.

Both the skirt and tee fabric are ITY knits from a recent FabricMart sale. The skirt was super easy to make (I think it took me around an hour, two hours if you count PDF assembly and fabric cutting time).

I'll note a few things about the skirt construction and sizing:

• According to the SBCC size chart, I'm a 2X, so that's what I sewed with no adjustments.
• Sizing is true to size chart measurements through the hips.
• As you can see from the line drawing, the skirt uses a yoga pant-style fabric waistband with no elastic. I felt like the waist ran a little large. I rarely size down for a waistband, but for this skirt, I'd grade down to a 1X the next time that I make this skirt.
• As noted in the pattern, you'll ease the waistband onto the skirt. The skirt waistband has a side seam and notches for the CB and center front (CF). Since the skirt itself has a CB seam, you can line the waistband notch up with that. The CF lacks any marking or notch, so make sure that you mark that point in some way (I cut a tiny snip into my seam allowance) while the fabric is still on the fold.
• The skirt waistband piece is marked to lay out and cut on the fold, but does not indicate the direction of stretch. If you've got your fabric folded selvedge-to-selvedge, that would put the stretch for the waistband running vertically. Given that my fabric didn't have much vertical stretch, I laid out the waistband on my fabric so that the fold was perpendicular to the selvedge, making the stretch go around my body. (Maybe this is why my waistband seemed a little big?)

The finished skirt is super comfortable (yoga pants comfortable, with that waistband) and very on-trend at the moment. I will definitely be making a few more of these for the summer--probably when I am in need of another instant gratification project.