Resizing a Vintage Pleated Skirt (Pt. 1)

I recently came into possession of a vintage pleated wool skirt from my grandmother. It was made by Pendleton and dates to about the 1970s or 1980s. The last time my family visited her, she invited my sister and I to raid her closet and take whatever we liked (that she was willing to part with of course). Seeing as I've been slowly developing the fashion sense of someone three times my age, I was certainly up for this. I chose a lovely silk floral-patterned blouse, and this green and blue tartan wool skirt. This skirt, however, was about four or five inches too large for me in the waist. Since it was a pleated skirt, I knew that resizing it would not be a simple task.

First of all, I removed the waistband to get a better look at what I was dealing with. I discovered that it had elastic inside, which probably meant that it originally had some stretch to it. But at some point the skirt had actually been altered to be larger, so that the elastic did not really have any purpose apart from maybe providing some stiffening. I also discovered that the pleats had been re-set, and were not equal in size.

I made my plan of attack: since I had so much to remove from the waist measurement, resizing every pleat would be impractical. As such, I decided to take in the side seams by two "panels", then make the back pleats smaller.

I unpicked one side seam and pinned it, then basted it together to get an idea of how it would lay. This pleat is an inverted pleat (not sure what the proper terminology is), with the top portion sewn closed before opening up. Facing the prospect of recreating this pleat after taking the sides in, I promptly got intimidated and decided to do the other pleats first.

When I tried the skirt on, I realized that when I made my alterations, the skirt would fit in the waist whilst being too tight in the hips. So, I decided to move the top of each pleat, tapering down to where the bottom originally laid. I began by marking with thread where I wanted my pleats to end up, shifted the tops over, basted, then sewed them down with a small machine stitch.

For the side seam situation, I had to call in some backup, namely, my mother. She helped me to pin and baste it— I'm still not exactly sure how this all worked out. For the upper part, I sewed a tapered seam to give me room in the hips while still fitting my waist. The white line is the tapered seam, and the green stitches mark the inner seam of the inverted pleat.

Next began the somewhat nightmarish process that was pressing out the inverted pleat. This involved lots of fussing around with the fabric, cursing, and accidentally pressing other pleats flat. It seemed like no matter how many times I pressed it, I was never happy with how the pleat fell. I wonder if this had something to do with the fact that I tapered the upper section. When I reached a point where I was about as happy as I could get with the pressing, I sewed down along the basting.

Tune in next time for the completion of this project.