Anna’s Coronation Dress- Finishing the Skirt

After what feels like forever, I can now finally make the last post about the skirt for Anna’s coronation dress! You can read my other posts about the skirt here and here.

I’m not going to lie, I’m very happy this skirt is done. I was getting very tired of working on it and seeing it around my house. Now that it’s done, I can work on long list of to-sew projects that keeps growing every week. (Most of them are repairs or adjustments to clothes so you won’t see them here on my blog. Especially since they are uninteresting and boring. 😉 )

After I finished sewing the appliqued panels to the celery green panels, I sewed all the panels to the dark green panels. Once I was done, the skirt looked like this…

As you can see, the skirt is HUGE. I began to call it a parachute skirt because it looked Iike one and was what I imagine would be the size of one.

Sewing the dark green panels wasn’t hard, but it didn’t turn out as nice as I wanted them to. I used my serger to do this and, although it made fast work of the task and finished the seams at the same time, I was still very new to working with a serger. Because of this, the seams did not sew straight. I tried to fix this by sewing another line of stitching with my sewing machine, but after that I decided to let it go and love the skirt for it’s imperfections. No matter how frustrated the imperfections made me. XD

After I finished sewing the panels together, I created the pleats for the skirt. I don’t have a photo showing this, but I had to pin the panels to my dress form in order to make sure they have the right drape. Although Simplicity’s pattern has marks on their pattern showing where the skirt pleats go, I decided not to follow them. Because I’m concerned I could have growth spurts in the future and possibly loose some weight because I feel better and want to exercise more, I wanted to take in the skirt’s panels more than the pattern wanted me to.

Once I got the panels to lay right, I baste stitched the top of the skirt before sewing in the waistband and the zipper. I also do not have photos of how I sewed them in, but while I pinned the waistband in I also pinned in the zipper. I did this because I wanted to make sure the zipper would lay correctly. After I finished pinning and checking how everything laid, I sewed everything together.

I know, it’s not the best photo of the waistband, but hopefully you see what I did. 🙂

Since the waistband was done, I began working on hemming the skirt. I used about 15 yards of bias tape to hem the skirt. Originally I wanted to make the bias tape myself, but I was very tired of working on the skirt so I bought the bias tape to save myself time and work. I wanted the thread to blend in with the color of the skirt, so I used thread in three different colors, dark green, white, and olive. I also hand sewed the bias tape down. I know it would be easier and faster to sew with my machine, but at that time I was under a lot of stress in my life and needed something repetitive to do with my hands (Such as hand sewing) to take my mind off things.

Once I was done sewing the bias tape, the skirt was done!

Although I say the skirt is done, it’s not completely done. I still need to add weights to the bottom of the skirt. The pattern called for weights in certain places on the bottom of the skirt. Because of these weights, the skirt’s appliqued panels will drape the right way and, when the wearer spins, the skirt will look the same way Anna’s skirt does in the movie when she spins. I decided not to add the weights to the skirt until I’m ready to wear it. 🙂

Now the skirt is done, all that’s left to finish is the bodice. Since I think I could grow a little bit taller, I decided to wait until I’m done growing to make the bodice. 🙂

That’s all for now! Thank you for reading!