After completing  my dress, I was on a little sewing streak and decided to go for McCalls 5591. I used some gorgeous home-dec cotton fabric from the Moda “Wonderland” collection, which I was amazingly able to buy locally (at Quilting in the Country). My friend Nicole bought the same fabric to make her first skirt, too.

I love the skirt! I love the pattern- it was so easy, nothing confused me or made me scratch my head. Plus, it has pockets! Yay pockets. At first the laziness factor creeped up on me and suggested I skip the pockets but I decided to go for them and I’m glad I did. I really do like having pockets, and they weren’t hard to do at all. I took a tip from the most recent issue of Threads and sewed a neutral pocket facing in place (instead of using the skirt fabric) so that it wouldn’t show through, and that worked well. I made View A, and instead of doing a contrasting band on the bottom (as shown on the envelope) I lengthened the front and back pieces by 5 inches (this meant I used 2 yards of fabric instead of 1 5/8). I’m very pleased with this one– and looking forward to finding my next project.