pattern, but I ended up with an extra 20cm or so. Huzzah! In pieces! Gee, it all looks so simple when you see it just sitting there like that. It isn't. I am lucky in that my mother is a sewer from way back, who has a nice sewing machine for all of her patchwork needs. I've only used her new machine once before, so it was a bit of a learning process. I kept trying to press buttons where they were on the one I grew up with, as opposed to where they actually are. The first step was staystitching the waist and side seams. You use a larger stitch for this (kind of the machine version of tacking) and it's done to prevent stretching. Then the darts were put in. It was at this point that I really thought the skirt was going to be too small for me, because the two back pieces looked absolutely tiny at the waist once the darts had been stitched in and pressed. Then came the really scary part: sewing in the zip. I was able to find one that was a brilliant match for the fabric, so that was good, but there is just something about zips that seem extremely scary to a novice sewer such as myself! Here, it's all pinned into place, which took a couple of tries, as you have to get it so that the seams come as close as possible to meeting in the middle of