McCall 5523 | The Selfish Seamstress

Another goodie in my recent sewing CARE package from Khai was McCall 5523:

I’ve been wanting this concept of skirt since seeing the movie Charlie Wilson’s War about a year ago or so. If you’re in the mood for a good movie, I don’t recommend it. However, if you are in the mood for a good skirt, there is one excellent skirt in the movie. It doesn’t have that big a role. It makes a couple of brief appearances on a character named “Jailbait.” Yes, that is what they call her. She’s one of Tom Hanks’s sexy secretaries. The skirt is a slim grey pencil skirt with a graceful flared panel in the back. It covers everything but it’s still hot. I can’t find a picture of her in the skirt online, sorry!

Here’s how mine is going so far:

First, the good points:

I salvaged this lovely plaid wool flannel fabric from a dress I never finished and was never going to finish because I messed up the plaid matching on it. (The fabric doesn’t look so good because of the flash photograph, but trust me, it’s nice. It has no sheen to it at all.) So, the fabric didn’t go to waste, and that’s one less guilt-inducing half-finished project lying around.
I’d say the plaid matching is going pretty well this time around! I figured out a new trick for doing perfectly symmetrical plaid matching. You might already know it, but it’s new to me.

Now, the bad. When I say I’ve been wanting this “concept” of skirt, I guess what I mean is that McCall 5525 View A just isn’t turning out the way I wish it would. McCall 5523 View A isn’t really a slim pencil skirt with a flared back. It’s more of a boxy skirt with flared back. More dowdy librarian than sexy secretary. The Selfish Seamstress has no patience for dowdy. I’m going to try to reshape it to give it a little more come-hither. I’ll let you know how it turns out.