Back in October I wrote about my plans for some makes in my closet that I don’t really wear, and wanted to go back and rework. Last month I got around to reworking this gathered skirt, originally sewn in 2015 and worn out of the house maybe…once? If that? Honestly, I never wore it. I liked the idea of it – I bought that fabric because I liked it, after all. Every few months I would try it on again when I was getting dressed, thinking maybe this time would be the time it would click and I’d want to wear it. But that was never the case. Here’s a reminder of what the original skirt I sewed looked like:

The main problem was that this is a mid-weight fabric and there was simply way, way too much fabric in the gathers at the waist. I didn’t use a pattern for the original project, and the skirt pieces were literally rectangles, so the gathers were dense. I sewed it with a favorite store-bought skirt in mind, matching the length, but the store-bought skirt doesn’t actually have gathers. It’s a full and heavy skirt, but very sleek and elegant looking. And this gathered skirt? It was not. So it stayed in my closet.

When I sewed my bird-print Fiore skirt last year, I realized that I could probably use the pattern to rework this skirt and turn it into something I’d actually wear. So I dismantled the skirt in the fall, and set aside the pieces until I had time to sit down and sew them up last month. I have to say that I’m really pleased with the end result.

The new skirt weighs probably half what the original one did – there’s much less fabric in it overall. And it’s gotten quite a lot of wear since I finished it as well! I’m frequently pairing it with my Eowyn blouse by Fabel Knitwear, knit in Osloull from Oslo Mikrospinneri (a blend of Norwegian wool and silk), as shown in these photos.

I did several things differently for this iteration of the Fiore skirt compared to my bird skirt. Firstly, I sewed view A here, with the back zip (my bird skirt is view C, with the button placket down the front). I did the longer length, which the pattern calls the below-knee version, although you can probably see it’s not below the knee on me (I’m 6′ / 182 cm tall). My bird version has three inches added to the bottom of the pattern, and I originally intended to do that for this version as well, but I spaced out while cutting out the pieces and forgot to add the length. So this version hits me mid-knee, which is fortunately also a nice length.

I decided to skip pockets, even though I had pocket pieces I could reuse from the original skirt – I wanted to practice keeping the seams nice and neat on the inside, and felt like the pockets would be too much added fuss. I did french seams for the side seams, and I’m super pleased with those. I’m also quite happy with how the zip went in. I just used a zipper from my stash, so it’s not an invisible zip, but it goes quite nicely with the fabric and doesn’t draw too much attention to itself so I think that’s fine.

Overall I’m so happy I took the time to dismantle the old skirt and sew a new one, and I wore it out twice in the first week alone after finishing it so it was pretty immediately gratifying. It was also good sewing practice for me, having sewn this pattern once before, so I could focus on details. So my FO Revisited series seems to be off to a good start! And I actually already have another project to share for this series nearly ready to go (I just need to give its new sleeves a good wet block first), so you can probably keep an eye out for that soon.