The Sandbridge Skirt is one of our favorite skirt patterns.  It enables us to sew many of the skirts we wear on a daily basis.  We wear both the Sandbridge Skirt in it’s original design, and we’ve hacked it into a Sandbridge maxi skirt several times.

Let’s talk about this fabric for a minute.  It’s chocolate brown twill fabric.  It’s a midweight cotton twill and is the most perfect fabric for this use.  It’s has just enough weight to make it stable and easy to work with, but not so heavy that the finished skirt pulls down off the waist from the weight.  I seriously can’t recommend this fabric enough.  If you look at the close up details of the skirt you can tell this is great quality fabric by the way the edges of the pockets hold firm and the belt loops stand up.  But you can see that it’s not too stiff and heavy by the way it wrinkles and holds a wrinkle.

Speaking of topstitching, you’ve probably noticed that contrasting thread, right?  It’s traditional jeans topstitching thread.  I decided to go ahead and use it on this skirt because the contrast makes it look so professional!  (On the front anyway…our machine had such a hard time with this thread for some reason, and there are several bird’s nests on the inside of the skirt!)  

For the pocket art, we decided to keep it simple by just adding a wide grosgrain ribbon across the back of one pocket.  

Of course a skirt this good called for a new top to go with it!  And the top is just about as special as the skirt.  We used the Phoenix Blouse pattern from Hey June Patterns.  It’s one of our favorites, and we’ve sewn up SO many of them.  

The fabric we used is new to us, but we’ll totally be using this fabric again as soon as we can find more!  This is a rayon sateen.  It’s very similar to rayon challis, but somehow is a little more stable to work with.  It doesn’t shift around quite a much as rayon challis.  And is has a sort of brushed texture which makes it even softer than rayon challis…which we didn’t think was possible!  

And being rayon, it’s perfect for summer heat.  Totally breathable and very lightweight makes the perfect combination on a breezy top like this one.  The fabric pattern is a grunge boho design.  We had fun playing with the directional “stripe” on the front yoke.  As you can see, this top has ties made from the rayon sateen fabric, and they’re very sturdy for a rayon fabric.

Feel free to head over to Skirt Fixation for more about this outfit.