The story of this skirt starts with the discovery of this fabulous cat fabric. Then with the help of amazing tutorials and sewing blogs, this gorgeous pleated skirt was created.

I was in Japan in June and visited Tokyo’s fabric district, Nippori Fabric Town. If you happen to pass by Tokyo don’t miss it (check more about Nippori Fabric Town here). In one of the stores I found a cotton fabric with the following print.

This has to be one of the most beautiful cat prints I’ve ever seen! I wasn’t sure about making a full dress with it so I got only a meter, which would be enough for a skirt for me.

Then I needed to decide which kind of skirt. I wanted it to be elegant and started searching for patterns and/or tutorials of nice elegant skirts. And suddenly I found this really good 24 step tutorial for the “perfect pleated skirt” in the blog from Miranda, onelittleminute.

The tutorial is available here and is extremely easy to follow. You must only be a bit meticulous with the measurements of the pleats, so take your ruler and some time.

Once pleats are measured and sewed into place the next thing you must do is add the zipper. In my case I didn’t want to add the pockets, so I just skipped those steps. My first attempt at inserting the invisible zipper didn’t go very well. I followed all the instructions but somehow it didn’t look that invisible…

(Because I didn’t have much fabric I couldn’t do any pattern matching. Sorry about that, I know it would look amazing!)

I was attempting to do this with a normal presser foot on my machine. After some advice from other sewers, I bought an invisible zipper presser foot for my machine. And oh boy it was worth it :D

Here is the result with the special foot.

The best thing is that I didn’t need to rip the zipper out and redo it. I just stitched again (closer to the zipper) using the new foot and it turn out perfect (and invisible!).

An important extra thing I did though was to line the skirt. The cotton I bought was a bit transparent for a skirt. So I decided to line it, but I wasn’t sure about how to deal with it and the pleats. I bought a very light white cotton to use as a lining and after digging in some forums, I ended up deciding to treat the lining fabric and the main fabric as one only. So when I constructed the pleats I worked with the two layers of fabric together. That ended up very well as you can see.

And it didn’t add much volume to the skirt which is nice because it still keeps its elegant shape. I just finished with a generous hem, which I think looks nice for this kind of skirt. The end result is below :)

I really really like the style of the skirt and will be repeating it for sure in the future. It’s also a relatively quick project. Meanwhile I have a tiny piece of this fabric left. Let’s see if I can pull off a matching crop top!

Hope you give a try and let me know if you have any questions!

Xo,

Catia