Attaching a woven skirt to a knit top - a tutorial

I like the relative crispness of a woven skirt, but a knit top to a dress has many advantages too. If you have a dress that is all woven, you will normally have an opening with some means of closing it in order to get the dress over the head or hips. (Exceptions might be peasant style dresses or dresses with shirring, which can then be stretched over the head to get the dress on.) With a knit dress, you may or may not have an opening, Often the neckline will be stretchy enough to get the dress on without the need to undo anything. Where you have a knit bodice and a woven gathered or circular skirt, you need to retain some stretchiness in the top of the skirt, unless you plan to put in an opening that goes down into the skirt. (And why would you want to do that if you didn't need to?)

This became one of my grand-daughter's favourite dresses that summer - it was so easy for her to get it on and off herself. To find out how to attach a woven skirt without losing the stretchiness in the waist, read on.

The top of this dress was made from a loose T shirt knit, and the skirt was a toning 100% cotton with tiny cream stars on it. I loved the combination of these fabrics. The Free Suncadia dress pattern came from Sew Much Ado. The one shown on their web site is made completely from knit fabrics but a woven skirt is easy to do, too. There are clear instructions as well as the free pattern in age 3.

The trick that Abby suggests to ensure you keep a nice stretch at the waistline, is to sew clear elastic into the waistline as you join the bodice to the bottom. I used a zig-zag stitch on my conventional machine to do this. And I was delighted to find that it worked very well. No sagginess, but easy to get on and off.

I can also offer you one alternative method which I devised this year.  This summer, I made a couple of skirt / shorts from Hey June's Monkey Bar skirt pattern. This comes in size 2-10. Yes, this is not a dress with a woven skirt attached to a bodice, but a woven skirt attached both to knit shorts and a knit waistband. However, the same principle applies, that I didn't want to lose the stretchiness in attaching the woven skirts.

 This now has become my new favourite way of attaching a woven skirt. I used shirring elastic in the bobbin of my sewing machine when gathering the skirt. This had the effect of gathering the skirt as I did it, but leaving it still stretchy.

So then when I attached the already gathered skirt to the knit part of the garment, I did so using a stretchy stitch (on my machine the only option for this is a simple zig-zag, but it works fine.)

 

So both of these methods work well at keeping some stretch when you attach a non-stretchy fabric (e.g. a woven cotton) to a stretchy fabric, like these knits and cotton spandex used in these projects.