Weekend Review: Your Skirt, Your Way

 

Your Skirt, Your Way / Jenniffer Taylor
Search Press, c2020.
128 p.

This is another book by a former Great British Sewing Bee contestant. It's the second book by Jenniffer Taylor, whose first book, Girl With a Sewing Machine, was published in 2020 shortly after her GBSB appearance. 

This book is a really interesting one for adventurous beginners, or those more accomplished sewists who want to create their own block to then make into a variety of skirts. There are 10 distinct skirts included in the book for readers to create.

The book starts with an intro, recommending necessary tools and basics, then moves into how to create your block based on your measurements. This section includes how to measure, how to draw out a block and how to create a toile to check fit. 

Then the following sections cover six shapes of skirt, waistbands, facings, zips and buttons, and then a section on pockets, yokes, hems and vents. There is a lot of info for sewists to use here. 

The final 40 pages are the actual skirt "recipes", as she calls them. They are not quite patterns, but the instructions about how to make the pattern based on your block -- and then how to construct them. I think there are many options here, with a style to suit every reader. And the details are cute too - I love the pockets on the flared Kate skirt.

I thought that this book was really well done, at just the right level for an ambitious beginner, straightforward but not overly simple. Skirts are a great starter project, and are also a good way to take a stab at pattern making. There is solid instruction, lots of photos, and some creative yet very wearable projects in this book -- a winner.