Anna’s Coronation Dress- Skirt Panels and Pattern Fix

Progress on the skirt for Anna’s coronation dress was fast, but then quickly slowed down due to life, a virus I caught, and other projects I’m working on. Now that I’m nearing completion of the skirt, I decided to finish writing my posts about the skirt.

In the last post I made about the skirt I talked about the fabric I found for the skirt and an instruction error in the pattern. Since that is the most important part of this post, I’ll talk about that first.

What exactly happened was while I was cutting out the fabric for the light green skirt panels (These are the panels that go on both sides of the olive green appliqued panel) I saw on the pattern piece that ten panels needed to be cut. I thought that was weird because there are ten olive green panels in the skirt. Since the light green panels are supposed to go on both sides of the olive green panels, I thought I needed to cut twice that number of panels.

For my own amusement, I decided to try to cut out ten panels and see what happens. Since the light green satin (The name of the satin color I used is celery) I was using for the light green panels was on clearance and I already knew based off my own attempts to drape the skirt myself, I knew I needed a lot of fabric so I bought all the fabric the store had. This ended up totaling the twice the amount of yards the Simplicity pattern called for. Because of this, I knew that if I followed the pattern’s instructions and cut ten light green panels, I could always cut more without worrying about where to buy more fabric.

Well, after I started to sew the panels together, I soon found out I was right and the fabric needed twenty light green panels instead of ten. At first I believed the pattern I was using, Simplicity’s S0746, was the problem. The patterns with the numbers S0746 are, from what I could find, the first print of the pattern. I purchased it a few weeks after it came out, so I thought the reason why the pattern was marked incorrectly is because it was the first print. Because of this, I purchased the second print of the pattern, 1215, in order to check and see if this error was still in the pattern.

Well… it is. The instructions for cutting the light green fabric in 1215 look like this…

The layout of the way to cut the light green panels shows to only lay out the piece five time on the fabric, which is folded. Because of this, twice as many panels are cut creating ten panels. But, like I said before, there are ten olive panels that are cut…

And if you look at a reference of Anna’s coronation dress, you can see the skirt has light green panels on both sides of the olive panels. And that means twice as many light green panels should be cut in order to make the skirt look like Anna’s skirt in the movie.

If you’re reading this and wondering how to fix this, it’s simple. Just take how many yards (or meters depending on where you live) the back of the envelope suggests using and double it.

According to the envelope, I needed less than 4 yards of light green fabric for my skirt. I needed twice that and, since I like to work with whole number, I rounded the number to the nearest whole number (In this case 4) and doubled it. For my skirt I used about 8 yards of fabric. If anyone plans on using either Simplicity’s S0746 or 1215, I suggest looking at the back of the envelope for the yards needed to make the panels and then double it. Or, if you’d like to work with whole numbers like me, round the amount of yards the pattern suggest up and then double it.

Ok, since I got that out of my system, let’s move on to how I made my skirt!

After figuring out the pattern problems and finished cutting out the celery colored panels, I cut out the dark green panels and another set of olive green panels…

The dark green fabric was hard to find. I don’t know why, but there was a lack of dark green fabric where I lived. The lack of dark green satin lasted for many months, but after a lot of searching I found enough fabric for the skirt. The fabric I bought and used for my skirt is a shinny polyester satin and was not what I was looking for. I wanted a dull satin like the celery colored satin, but the only satin I could find was shinny, so I used it anyway.

I also cut out another set of olive green panels to act as a lining for the appliqued panels. I wanted to protect the back of the stitches of the appliqued panels and this seemed to be the best way to do it. Adding a lining to the skirt isn’t included in the Simplicity pattern so I had to figure out how to sew it in. This wasn’t a very hard to do, but it took time because I didn’t have a working sewing machine at that time, forcing me to sew it by hand.

I don’t have any photos of my work on the skirt lining so I cannot talk about how I sewed it in very well. Once it was done the front looked like this…

But the back looked like this…

I also top stitched the appliqued panel to keep the lining in place and make both pieces act as one.

Although I’m not done talking about how I made the skirt, I’ll stop for now and finish it in another post.

Thank you for reading!