Totally Minnie Construction – Her Universe Fashion Show 2023 – Part 8: Skirting the Issue

Alright, let’s talk about that giant skirt. This is part 8 of my series describing the construction of my winning look for the Her Universe Fashion Show 2023. If you want to start from the beginning of the construction journey for my Totally Minnie look, start with this post.

I knew from the start of designing this that I wanted a multi-layered ruffled look for the skirt. Classic Minnie usually has a full skirt with a ruffle at the bottom so I was pulling that in, but I was also drawing heavily on the gowns of the 80’s that had a drop waist with big massive skirts. Minnie is feminine and fun, so ultimately I wanted to convey a glamorous, runway version of that.

I was also inspired by some current looks by Dior and Oscar de la Renta that also use voluminous folds as well some of the more classic ruffled Dior looks (large dress in the middle above) and Siriano’s work. In order to get the look I wanted, it required about 60 yards of fabric as well as a rather complicated hoop skirt, unlike anything I had built or could really find guidance on through internet searches. I had planned to talk about the hoop skirt in this part, but I had forgotten how much work went into the skirt, so it’ll have to wait until next time.

As I mentioned in the early post about the fabric, I originally did my calculations based on cutting the fabric parallel to the grain but when I actually started using it, I realized I should cut it in strips with the grain running top to bottom. The biggest reason was because I ended up doing the bodice on the grain when I found the slubs looked nicer in that direction. The other reason was that the drape of the silk made for nicer ruffles cut perpendicular to the grain. On the upside, because one typically tears silk, this did make measuring out the panels to sew together much easier.

Now mathematically, this should have been the same area of ruffles so it shouldn’t have made a difference. Clearly I had done my math wrong somewhere, but I honestly don’t know if I could have gathered as much as I originally planned. The dress ended up at 20 lbs as is and with even more fabric, it would have been even heavier.

I believe the error occurred with my estimation of how deep each layer should be. Originally they were going be like 12” or so based on my height but upon seeing it on an actual dressform and visualizing how much they needed to overlap, I realized that was no where near big enough for the look I was going for. So the top tier is 18” deep and the bottom two tiers are 21” deep each. 

Each silk layer was actually three layers. Due to its delicate nature, the silk was underlined by red cotton voile. And then the whole thing was backed by poly dupioni to give it strength and because I liked the drape of the poly dupioni as it had bigger waves than the silk on its own. I also thought it gave it a really classy look to have the lining. The poly was attached to the silk/voile like normal — right sides together — and then understitched so that the silk rolled over.

Given the train on the skirt, the poly dupioni also gave it some protection. Even by the end of just the one night of the competition there was some wear on the bottom edge (see pictures above), so I’m really glad I had that!

I also inserted 3 inch horsehair braid at the bottom of each layer between the silk/voile and poly dupioni. This also helped give those full ruffles. The braid was caught by the understitching to keep it in place.

The organza was much simpler. I could also tear that of rmeasuring which was nice. The one part about the organza was figuring out how to do the stitching because I wanted it to be as seamless as possible, but still strong. I tried a number of different options and ended up going with French seams done with monofilament for attaching the panels to each other and again used the monofilament to attach the horsehair braid at the bottom. I didn’t end up sewing the top of the horsehair braid because it really broke up the visual and often didn’t lay perfectly flat. It usually stayed under on its own, and we just needed to do a quick double check before I went on stage.

Each tier was made of connected sections and a section was the width of fabric, or in other words 60 inches. For the silk, I ended up with 3 sections on the top layer, 5 sections on the middle layer, and 8 sections on the bottom layers. For the organza, I needed a bit more to give it fullness, so I had 4 sections on top, 6 in the middle and 10 on the bottom. Mostly I doubled for the organza which also made placement easier.

I also serged the top edges of all the layers. This was partly because I was all about the clean finish, but also because all the little shreds of organza and silk were driving me up the wall. If felt so good to have all those edges serged and I could just focus on the skirt itself and not worry that I was losing half my layer depth as it unraveled!

Gathering this many yards of fabric was no easy feat. I used a technique I’ve done before which was to zigzag over fishing line. With fishing line, I didn’t have to worry about it breaking as I sewed it down. This worked quite well although it was still a lot to gather!

To attach it to the skirt, I laid out the base skirt which was made out of some thicker crepe fabric from Joann’s. I just bought the whole bolt since I wasn’t sure how much I was going to need. I cut a full circle skirt with a slice down one radius and then distributed the gathers. I pinned the ruffles upside down so that when they flipped over, they’d have additional poof. I was originally going to also add a layer of tulle here, but due to some issues I had earlier that I’ll talk about in another post, I realized this would be useless so I skipped it.

Then I sewed it down. This was probably one of the most labor intensive parts of the whole project since wrangling those layers took actual physical strength. Additionally, since it was so hard to manipulate them, I was constantly getting tucks in the sewing that I would have to seam rip and redo. But it was just a ton of fabric. You can see in the image above that I slid over an extra side table on the left just to hold some of the weight.

The organza was lighter so a bit easier. I actually pre-gathered it using the ruffler foot before serging the ruffled edge. If you’re wondering about yet another machine, this is my old machine. The ruffler foot was just much cheaper for that machine than my Bernina and so it has effectively become my ruffling machine. I could have ruffled it as I serged it but the ruffler does more ruffles than the gathering foot on my serger.

I still had to manipulate the skirt which already had silk ruffles on it, but it wasn’t too bad. For the organza I did the same technique with laying out the skirt and pinning, just in this case I pinned about an inch above the silk so I didn’t have to do any marking before hand. Sewing through it was also much easier on account of it being thinner.

One thing that I did that made my life much easier was making the bottom 2 tiers of the skirt actually separated from the top. There were multiple reasons for this:

1. The primary reason I did this was because of travel. Before I knew that I could get my dress its own seat on the plane (yes, I did that), I thought I was going to have check it. Well, this scared the heck out of me and given what happened to some of the other designers, I wasn’t wrong in that fear. By making the skirt detachable, I could check the skirt, bring the bodice with its mini-skirt in carry-on and then absolute worst case scenario if something happened to my check baggage, I would still have something that I could wear down the runway.
2. I was putting a lot of work into this dress and, honestly, I don’t know of anywhere else except maybe D23 that I could wear it again. By making it detachable, I now had a cute little cocktail dress that I could possibly wear to some other event. I did actually end up wearing it as the cocktail dress to the after party.
3. It made sewing the large, long ruffled layers much, much easier. I could detach the skirt, work on it and then easily reattach it to see how it was looking. During the final fitting stages where I had to make small tweak adjustments to the height of the layers to ensure I didn’t trip on them, this was extremely useful.
4. It made getting into dress much easier as well. I could get the top part situated and hang out in that if needed and then just attach the skirt shortly before I needed to.

I would 100% do this again in the future if my gown allowed for it. It was so convenient and gives the outfit such versatility. Hopefully I have the chance to do so!

So how did I make the bottom tiers separate? I used a 36” separating zipper and attached one side to the bodice and one to the top of the skirt. Again, I was very concerned about strength so I added a canvas twill layer as the base that was sewn to the bodice between the lining and top. This was also what I attached the organza and silk layers to. The bodice did have an additional underskirt in a light lining fabric for when it would be worn without the lower tiers. In hindsight, this was probably unnecessary but it’s there now.

So there you have doing all the tiers. When I finally got to this point, I sighed with relief. This was when I really started to see that this dress could be real.

The last part involving the skirt was fitting. I need to make sure I wouldn’t trip on it and intentionally wanted the hem to be a little higher off the floor at the slit so you could see the shoes since they’re a key part of the outfit. I didn’t want them hidden all night! A good friend helped me with the fitting, pinning the skirt up as needed and then I went and sewed the pins in place. It took 2 fittings to get it just right, adjusting a little bit each time.

Next up I’ll talk about the hoop skirt that I made to give it the great bell shape. I made sure it would have worked without it (see again my travel fears), but it was so much more impressive with it.