Today I’ve got my review of the Sabina Skirt by the Little Pomegranate (damn, never realised that in nearly 40 years on this planet I have not yet successfully learnt to spell the word “pomegranate”), on which I’ve gone a little bit “hack happy” in this pretty pink version.

The Sabina Skirt is a FREE pattern which you can get access to when you sign up to Rumana’s newletter, so there’s nothing to lose!

The Sabina Skirt came to my attention when I did a little poll in my Instagram stories to ask fellow sewists whether or not they thought that the Mave Skirt by True Bias was worth purchasing or not.

As a beginner sewist, I would definitely have purchased something like the Mave Skirt. But as a sewist who know more or less know what I’m doing, I now look at a pattern like Mave and see three rectangles, a rectangular waistband and inseam pockets.

And I know that I could put that together myself with pretty minimal effort.

Yet, there is still a part of me which wonders whether it is worth the money to just minimise my time investment even further.

After all, if I buy even a simple pattern like this, someone else has done the work of ensuring that the pocket placement is just right. And make sure that the level of gathering at the tiers is just right, rather than “not enough” or “too bulky”.

The other advantage of buying even a simple pattern like the Mave Skirt is that getting the elastic waist to have the right proportions of gathered without bulk can be a challenge.

But I still felt rather annoyed at myself for wanting to buy something that I knew I could create with a bit (but still very minimal) of effort.

For what it’s worth, the responses to my question on Instagram came back 50:50 on whether buying the Mave Skirt was worth it. But a fellow sewist kindly reached out to me and suggested the Sabina Skirt by the Little Pomengranate as an alternative starting point for achieving the tiered maxi skirt look.

Perfect.

I liked that the Sabina Skirt used slash pockets, rather than inseam ones, these are my favourite kind of pockets. Although I haven’t really been able to photograph them well – you’ll just have to trust me that there are some nice roomy slash pockets in there! I also liked the way Sabina incorporated a bit of shaping from the waist to the hip, so that there isn’t any excessive amount of gathering right around the waist once the elastic goes in.

So in the end, I arrived at quite a quantifiable answer to my question as to how much I consider my time and convenience to be worth.

Purchasing the Mave Skirt would have required paying about 12 euros for the pattern plus 10 euros for printing (most of that being postage!). 22 euros was too much to pay for the convenience of most of the key work being done for me.

But since the Sabina Skirt was free, all I had to pay was the 10 euros for printing, which seemed like a reasonable compromise for convenience.

My Sabina Skirt

My Sabina Skirt is made from “Kelsey” Viscose Crepe by Atelier Brunette.

My Sabina skirt is a size 16. The Sabina Skirt pattern caters for a maximum waist size of 130cm (51.5″) and hpi size of 154cm (61″).

Obviously I still had few modifications to make to the pattern to get my tiered skirt.

For my top tier, I have used the Sabina Skirt pattern as it is but I cut the length at 30cm (plus seam allowances).

For my second tier, I used the width of the bottom ruffle piece which comes with the Sabina skirt, again making this tier 30cm plus seam allowance.

The third tier I created myself, making the width 1.5 times that of the second tier. I again made it 30cm long, plus hem and seam allowance.

This created a very wide piece, so I had to cut it on the cross-grain with a centre seam in each of my front and back pieces to get it to work.

So, in the end, my modifications from the Sabina skirt pattern as designed were pretty basic!

Also, I would just note that I didn’t look at the Sabina Skirt instructions at all, so I can’t vouch for them. I tried to email them to myself to look at on my phone but the file size was too large (yes, I know I need to figure out how to use a drop box, but not today!).

So I decided to go it alone.

Waistband worries

I have obviously made a few visual changes to the finishing of the elastic waist. Like in the Mave Skirt, I have added a drawstring for visual effect.

I also wanted to topstitch down the elastic, but I had an entirely self-created issue that my elastic was too narrow.

I hadn’t want to go out to buy something wider and used what I had which was probably 2cm wide. But with a wider elastic, I would have been able to get more evenly divided topstitching on it, so that it one little regret where I wish I had gone the extra mile!

Speaking of waistbands, I recently posted on Instagram about how, when stitching down a waistband from the outside, there is almost always some part of the inside waistband that I fail to catch and end up having to hand sitch down.

No matter how many pins I use!

Well, I definitely wasn’t alone in this experiences and I received quite a few tips about how to minimise these waist band worries.

A very simple one which blew my mind was to attach the inside of the waistband to the inside of the skirt FIRST and then topstitch the outside of the waistband to the outside of the skirt.

Well, I figured that an elastic waist was the perfect low-stakes opportunity to try out such a new technique, since, if I messed up, details wouldn’t really be obvious once the elastic was in.

Now it did work well, but I have to say, that I am not convinced that it is the best possible method for an inaccurate sewist like me.

Sewing confession alert: hands up if you have ever been sewing down the inside of a waistband and seen that your waistband has stretched out a bit during construction and so is just a little longer than it needs to be? Well, I’ve been there, and I have not been too proud to introduce a little tuck or pleat of the fabric along the inside of the waistband to just get rid of the excess fabric without having to do much else.

A little unsightly pleat on the inside of my waistband is not going to offend anyone!

Buuuuuut, if you’re using the technique of sewing the outside last, this option is no longer available, as you can’t go having a little bump or pleat visible on the outside of the waistband.

So, since I don’t trust my accuracy, I feel that perhaps sticking to my usual method is going to be the right one for me.

We’ll see!

All in all, I’m really happy with my Sabina skirt hack – it has come out just about as I had imagined and I am ready for some summer loving breezy maxi-skirt action!!