Pleather Skirt

After a few days of true spring winter is again back (crazy times, crazy weather!). Which is good, given that we are under more and more cruel lockdown and people have been severely fined for walking along Vitoshka - our main city street, a pedestrian zone. Not being able to go out hiking, this weekend I sewed a new skirt, my first pleather clothing item.

The pattern is skirt #112 of Burdastyle 05 / 2019, a pattern which I have been practicing  to sew a couple of times already. The pleather was a piece, gifted to me by my sewing friend, one of those many pieces of fabric I received from her last year. Unfortunately the pleather turned out to be very old and of very low quality. I had much trouble finding enough fabric without defects to cut out my pieces from, and soon after I started sewing it the supposedly defect-free pleather began ungluing and bubbling.

This pleather is also very, very sticky and as I don't have a teflon foot for my machine, I had to sew the skirt sandwiched between packaging paper to make the fabric flow through the machine. Given how complicated the pattern is, with all the decorative seams and pockets, and how fragile the pleather turned out, that was a challenge!

Last night's view from the balcony

The skirt is fully lined. I used a piece of acetate lining fabric, also included in the gift package.

To finish the hem of the skirt, I applied Hongkong finish to the edge, using a ready-made bias band, and then sewed the edge to the skirt. I tried first stitching it by hand with invisible stitches, but the pleather wasn't behaving like normal fabric, so I abandoned the hand stitching and did a normal hem seam on the machine.

I sewed the lining, using french seams all along, but I left the edges of the pleather raw, as it does not fray at all. All in all, I'm pretty satisfied with myself and the final product I was able to achieve, although the low quality of the skirt renders it unwearable. Gaby might put it on once or twice, until the upper bubbled layer brakes (or it might happen sooner, I don't know), but I definitely learned quite a lot about sewing with pleather and I am going to buy a teflon foot (and a couple of other specialty foots) for my machine soon.

Is this nature's idea of a joke for the 1st of April?