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         50's pleated and gathered skirts 

    Caveat:  these instructions are not from 
*recent* experience. 
    
    I will give directions for a knife-pleated 
skirt.  Changes for box pleats, gathers, etc. 
should be obvious.  One pattern we liked was knife 
pleats running from a box pleat in front to an 
inverted pleat in the back. 
    We bought two yards of fabric to make a skirt; 
you might be well advised to measure the length of 
the skirt you want, add a suitable amount for hem, 
seam allowance, and shrinkage, then double it. 
    The fabric available was a yard or forty-five 
inches wide; if you are using sixty-inch fabric, 
you can make the skirt really, really full, make a 
skimpy skirt from a single panel, or (GASP!) waste 
fabric. 
    Wash the fabric and straighten the ends. 
    If you are making a miniskirt, tear a strip 
off one selvage to be the waistband, then tear the 
fabric in half crosswise.  If the skirt is longer 
than your waist measurement, tear the fabric in 
half first, then tear a waistband off one of the 
pieces.  
    You may make any style of waistband; I'll 
assume the light-fabric style that starts out four 
times the finished width.  If the selvage of the 
fabric is good, you may plan the waistband to use 
the selvage as an edge-finish, but if the selvage 
is puckered, cut or tear it off.  If it is flat-
but-fuzzy, treat it as you would treat a raw edge.  
(My waistband instructions assume that you have 
torn off an unusable selvage.) 
    Press and shrink the torn edges if necessary, 
then sew the edges of the two skirt pieces 
together and install a zipper in one of the seams, 
making sure the end of the zipper chain is below 
the seam allowance.  (50's skirts invariably had 
zippers, but the ideal was to keep them out of 
sight, so you can use another closing if you don't 
make a display of it.) 
    (We usually sewed the seam with the zipper in 
it after basting the pleats, but before finishing 
the waistband, so that the ends of the zipper 
could be hidden inside the waistband.  But I'm 
describing it this way so I can say "zipper" 
instead of "the place where the zipper is going to 
be."  The pre-planned method makes it much easier 
to deal with a pre-sewn zipper than the by-guess-
and-by-golly method did.) 
    Make a mark the width of your seam allowance 
from one end of the band.  You may, if you wish, 
also leave enough space to make a little tab for 
the buttonhole, so that you won't have to work it 
through the pleats.  A tab as long as the width of 
the finished waistband, or slightly more, will be 
about right.  Make the seam allowance the same 
width as the tab, to avoid a ridge inside the tab 
where the edge of the seam allowance falls.  
Another approach is to grade the seam allowance, 
making it narrow enough not to be a consideration 
when working the buttonhole, but in light fabric, 
extra layers under a buttonhole are all to the 
good -- if they are uniform in thickness. 
    I don't recall any skirts that didn't button 
at the waist:  buttons were easy to come by, and 
we knew how to install them.  I like better a band 
that closes with two #3 hooks side by side, or a 
pointed tab with a hook under the point.  There 
are also special wide hooks made for the bands on 
pants and skirts, which you may like more than I 
do. 
    Make a second mark to indicate your waist 
measurement, then divide the waist measurement 
into the desired number of pleats.  You will 
probably get this number by dividing the waist 
measurement by the desired width of pleat, but if 
convenient, round the number of pleats to a power 
of two, so that you can measure your pleats by 
repeated folding in half.  If you have no druthers 
as to pleat width, make marks halfway between 
marks until it looks about right. 
    You want both the band overlap and the pleats 
to be pointing to your back at the left side.  You 
may put the opening on the right, if that is where 
you are accustomed to finding it, but must work a 
mirror image of my directions.  
    It was also permissible to put the zipper at 
center back, but putting a zipper where it's hard 
to reach is kind of dumb.  Under no circumstances 
may a lady's skirt or pants open in center front. 
    Now the tricky part:  you want the zipper to 
end up flat to your body and underneath a pleat.  
I used to pin my pleats several times before 
accomplishing this, but since then I've hit upon 
the novel idea of thinking things out beforehand, 
so you should have an easier time. 
    The way to use up all of a piece of fabric in 
knife pleats of equal size is to make marks at 
uniform distances around or across the fabric -- 
"around" in the case of a skirt -- and pin these 
marks to the same number of equally-spaced marks 
on the other piece of fabric.  Hence, the marks I 
told you to make on the waistband.  You now need 
to divide the skirt waist into the same number of 
spaces as the waistband, and arrange the spaces so 
that the zipper ends up inside a pleat.  Don't 
forget that the end marks on the waistband will 
both be matched to the same mark on the skirt; 
count the number of spaces, not the number of 
marks needed to divide those spaces.  (Trying to 
match thirty pleats on the band to thirty-one 
pleats on the skirt is known in psychology as a 
"fence post error".) 

A digression on knife pleats in general: 

    The amount of fabric in each pleat will be 
determined by the spacing of the pleats and the 
ratio of the skirt to the waistband.  
    For example, if the skirt is three times as 
wide as the waistband, there will be three times 
as much fabric in each pleat as the spacing of the 
pleats, and the pleats will be three layers thick 
all around. 
    If the skirt is twice as wide as the 
waistband, there will be twice as much fabric in 
each pleat as the spacing of the pleats -- half of 
each pleat will be three layers thick, and half 
will be only one layer thick.  Another way to 
think of this (assuming one-inch spacing of the 
pleats) is that half-inch pleats have half an inch 
of unpleated fabric between them.  You will still 
*see* one-inch pleats, because the folds that you 
can see are one inch apart, but you'll have only 
half an inch to hide your zipper in. 
    If the skirt is more than three times as wide 
as the waistband, the pleats will overlap, so that 
some parts are three layers thick and some are 
five layers thick.  If very heavy fabric is 
pleated very full, this can be a problem -- which 
is why a good wool kilt is expensive even though 
it appears to be a simple pleated skirt.   
    Whether the skirt is more than, less than, or 
exactly three times as wide as the waist, the part 
of the pleat that shows will be exactly as wide as 
indicated by the marks on the waistband, and the 
second fold -- the one *not* indicated by the mark 
on the skirt -- will divide the hidden part of the 
pleat exactly in half. 

End digression. 

    Therefore, if you place your first mark on the 
skirt by measuring the pleat spacing toward the 
back of the skirt from the stitching on the 
zipper, and measure all your marks from this mark, 
the stitching on the zipper will be just under the 
fold of the pleat on the overlap of the waistband. 
    You will probably want to make it a little 
farther under than this to make sure it stays out 
of sight, but if the pleats are narrow or shallow, 
there is risk of running into the second fold.  
Indeed, you may need to locate this second fold, 
rather than the main mark, with respect to the 
zipper, in which case your measurements are a 
little more complicated.  
    First, you need to know the exact distance 
between the marks on the skirt, where with the 
first method, all you need to know is how many 
parts to divide the skirt into.  Subtract the 
distance between the marks on the waistband from 
the distance between marks on the skirt.  (You can 
do this with numbers or with marks on strips of 
paper.)  Divide the difference in two (with your 
calculator or by folding the paper). 
    This is how far forward your first mark needs 
to be from the forward stitching line on the 
zipper.  If half the hidden part is wider than the 
zipper, you may push it a little farther to be 
sure the second fold clears the zipper, but you 
*can* fold right at the stitching line. 

    Lay your waistband out with the buttonhole tab 
to the left, and the right side up.  If making the 
four-layer waistband, draw a line a quarter inch 
from the raw edge and line up the raw edge of the 
skirt with this line.  

Digression on other waistbands: 
     
    Some waistband styles require you to line up 
the raw edges, some require you to put the wrong 
side of the skirt on the right side of the 
waistband, etc.  I am going to ignore all these 
variations, save to note that when you pin the 
skirt with the wrong side next to the band, the 
second folds of the pleats will be the folds that 
show.  I leave pre-planning these pleats as an 
exercise for the reader. 

End Digression 

    Right sides together, pin each mark on the 
skirt to the corresponding mark on the waistband.  
(If the zipper seam is already sewn, this will 
have to be done in sections, which is why we left 
sewing this seam for later -- but if everything is 
pre-marked, you can flop the fabric around a lot 
without getting lost, and the zipper is much 
easier to install while the skirt is still flat.) 
    Then pull each loop of fabric to the right and 
pin it with its raw edge along the line drawn on 
the waistband, and the raw edges of all skirt 
layers exactly aligned.  Pulling down on each 
pleat while resisting the pull with your other 
hand at the top of the pleat will help the pleats 
to lie properly.  I usually put extra pins about 
six inches below the stitching line to help keep 
the folds lined up. 
    Sew the skirt to the waistband, then press the 
waistband away from the skirt, trying not to press 
more of the pleats than will be pressed when you 
iron the finished skirt.  
    Fold the waistband so that its raw edges meet, 
then press in this fold.  Fold again so that the 
first fold just covers the stitching that secures 
the skirt to the band.  Do not press this second 
fold. 
    Turn in the seam allowances on both ends of 
the band -- you'll need to trim the band to length 
at this point.  
    A narrow tab on the hidden end of the band 
makes it easier to make it flat.  On light 
fabrics, allow the usual half-inch seam allowance, 
and turn only half of it under.  On heavy fabrics, 
you'll need a somewhat wider allowance. 
    Turn the seam allowances on the inside of the 
band a bit more than the allowances of the 
outside, to make sure they stay hidden.  Secure 
the folds with spaced backstitch on the inside, 
going not quite through all layers.  Some slip-
stitching may be necessary. 
    On a casual style, you may secure the folds by 
machine-topstitching around the band on the right 
side, just far enough from the seam and edges to 
be sure of catching all layers.  This is not 
authentic, as skirts were not casual wear. 

    Third-millenium note:  Some styles of 
waistband are easier to keep flat when you miter 
the corners.  When this is so, you should fold the 
corner of each end of the waistband on a true-bias 
line that passes through the corner of the 
stitching line before sewing it  to the skirt. 
    End third-millenium note. 

    Now work a buttonhole, sew on a button, and 
try the skirt on to see how wide you want to make 
the hem.  To be truly authentic, you must blind-
stitch the hem by hand.  But top-stitching away 
down at the hem isn't all that easy to see, if the 
thread matches. 
    During the fifties, skirt length varied from 
mid-calf to just below the knee, with the longer 
skirts earlier.  (This culminated in the 
miniskirts of the sixties.) 
     
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