I ended up deciding to do separate front skirts and bodice (aka there is a waist seam), instead of draping the front all in one. It seemed easier at the time?

So first I needed the side-back skirt. I wanted to cut it in gores, so there is less fabric to pleat and more in the bottom of the skirt.

My fabric is 54″ wide, and I figured 1/3 at the top 2/3 at the bottom made sense. So pinned off 36″ on each side, folded the fabric in half matching the pins up, and cut along the fold. Voila, two gored skirt pieces which are identical!

This doesn’t work as well if you have a patterned fabric fyi, since you will end up with two right (or left sides).

Here I followed the instructions on Katherine’s tutorial, but I took a bunch of pictures along the way since I found it not 100% clear.

First, fold the fabric under for about 8 inches on one side, which will be one side of the pocket slit. For me this was on the bias edge of the fabric, since I planned to have the selvedge edge attach to the back skirt piece.

Pleat the fabric 3-4 times, and baste it together at the top. This entire top edge will end up hidden under the back fabric.

Pleated fabric. If you are better at pleats than me, you won’t have that extra bit on the left, but I’m not that good at making 4 even pleats. This pleated bit is placed on the top side of the skirt fabric. The underside of the pocket seam is currently face up on the right (aka wrong side of the fabric is showing).

Cut a tiny snip into the edge of the skirt fabric, since you will be turning under the pleated part that is attached (you can see the pin holding it on)

Flip that whole piece under the back fabric. Now the turned under edge of the pocket seam is the left edge showing. 

Sew the long seam of the pleated skirt side to the skirt back. The extra triangle to the right is the extra bit of pleat (from the first picture). Since I had that, I couldn’t just match the side seams up exactly at the top.

I hope this makes some amount of sense. It took me a bunch of pinning to make everything end up the right way, so just pin the heck out of everything until you are sure things are good.

And lest anyone thing I’m fast at making this, that is so not the case! I tend to sew for a few weeks and take photos as I go, but then I wait to post them over the course of a couple of days. (This is over a week of sewing work for me, and it happened 2 weeks ago)