Ginger Skirt, Take Three

First of all, thank you to everyone who commented on my last post, and made me feel so much better about ditching (at least for now) the work-in-progress I was wrestling with - you were all absolutely right! A week of knitting instead has been just what I needed; my tunic is almost done done AND I'm getting excited about sewing again. :) I have a couple of refashions planned that I'm hoping to get done over the school holiday break...here's hoping, anyhow!

In the meanwhile, I thought I'd post my third version of Colette Patterns' Ginger Skirt. This is the chevron stripe version, view 3 I think. I really meant this to be a muslin, just to get some practice in working with stripes, but commandeered it into service during MMM simply because my options were so limited. And as it happened, this skirt was one of the most commented on / favourited of all my Flickr posts. Go figure!

Here 'tis:

It's quite a heavy cotton (I want to say twill, but I'm not sure...), but very soft, and not stiff at all. It's hard to tell from the above photos, but the stripes are fairly intricate; red, white, yellow and aqua, in varying widths - very good practice for stripe-matching! And I'm pretty happy with the job I did on that score:

I added pockets to the side seams, using a navy poplin - nothing fancy or exciting. One thing I should have done was sew some stay tape or similar into the pocket section - because the side seams are already cut on the diagonal I have a feeling that over time that part is going to stretch out of shape. Especially since I can't seem to keep my hands out of pockets if I have them. I'll know that for next time!

But there is one other thing I'd love some advice on - the side seams. Now, I thought I'd cut the fabric out according to the pattern piece directions, and the stripes on the front and back seams align very nicely. But why (why??) do the side seams look like this??

It didn't matter how I pinned or manipulated those pieces, they simply wouldn't match up. Is this normal? Should the side seams align properly also? Or does the angle of the A line skirt make that impossible? I'm stumped and I can't work it out!

Does anyone know of an online tutorial on this? The ones I looked at (and admittedly, I didn't look very hard...) were all focused on matching up the front or back seams. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated! I can't fix this one, being out of fabric, but I'd really like any future versions to be better than this.

In the meanwhile, have a wonderful week :)

Danielle oxo