Non-vintage sewing: easy girl's skirt

I stuck to the agenda (that's one gold star for me!) and finished this ad-libbed present:

Skirt front

Skirt back

The skirt is just made up of a desired length for the main fabric, which was cut shorter than the width of the fabric so I could match up the large scale pattern on the back seam. Then I cut a strip of the contrasting ruffle fabric, using the whole width of the fabric.

To get well-balanced gathers, before I sewed my gathering stitches, I marked the main skirt and ruffle piece each along one edge (where they join each other) at 1/4, 1/2 and 3/4 points eg. fold in half and make a little mark with pen, then fold that half in to the middle to get the quarterly points and mark again. Then it's just a matter of matching those marks together and pulling up the gathering stitches to fit.

It was too easy for a very pleasing end result. It's adaptable too by either changing the length of the pieces or having more tiers of ruffles. I joined the ruffle, pressed and top-stitched the seam allowance up BEFORE sewing the back seam. Then I folded the waist over to make a casing and I used 2 cm non-roll elastic.