As promised, here’s a tutorial of how I made my navy and red Peggy dress from the Lady Skater pattern. I used thick knits for this but if you decide to use a woven fabric you can still apply the same general technique for the paneled skirt as long as you start off with a similarly shaped pattern meant for wovens.

What you’ll need:
-the Lady Skater pattern
-fabric as indicated by the pattern
-about an extra half yard of contrasting fabric
-two 1″ buttons (Peggy’s dress has gold ones)
-thread to match both fabrics

I started off with the skirt piece. Since I was using a thicker knit with less stretch than the Lady Skater pattern calls for, I cut about an extra inch past the skirt piece. I then cut a rectangle in red the same height as the skirt piece and about 5-6″ wide, depending how subtle you want the red panels to be.

The photo on the right shows the ruler marker where I cut the navy fabric. I sort of eyeballed it. The navy fabric is one half of the skirt, cut on the fold.

Once you’ve cut slices off the navy fabric, rearrange the panels so the red rectangle is inserted between the blue slices. 

When you’ve sewn all the panels together, they should look like this. Remember, this is still just one half of the skirt. Now go back and do the same thing for the back of the skirt.

This is the fun part! You’re going to make a single box pleat at each red rectangle as shown. Baste it in place and treat it as normal.

The rest of the dress is made mostly according to the pattern. The only changes I made were to omit the neckband and just folded it over instead. Ditto the sleeves.

I also made the waist button tab thing that I forgot to photograph but it was pretty simple to make. I measured the distance between the two front pleats, added about 2″ for seams and so it would lie past the pleats, and then cut two long ovals that length and 2.5″ tall. I sewed them together, leaving 3″ open on one of the side seams, and then turned the whole thing inside out and top-stitched around it, closing the open 3″ in the process. It’s attached to the dress by the two decorative buttons in the front.

And there you have it! A Lady Peggy.