Anyway, I finally hit on a way to fix it without making it look really strange/messing up the tiers. I've combined it with one of my great loves - crochet!
I have a lovely book of antique crochet patterns. I measured up the length of the tier that needed repair, and then used one of the patterns from the book (which I won't reproduce here, for copyright reasons) to crochet a length of lace to fit...all 60 inches of it!
I used some fine crochet cotton leftover from another project, and a 1.25mm steel hook. It worked up surprisingly quickly, and was fun to do. I do like crocheting lace, but don't have much use for it at the moment due to the marauding cats who would tear to shreds any delicate lace decorations that I left lying around.
The next step was to repair the hole in the skirt. I ironed on some interfacing, carefully lining up the torn edges. Then, since the only interfacing I had lying around was quite thin, I stuck another piece over the top of the worst bit.
Now I was ready for stitching! I just used a basic zigzag to gather together the torn edges.
This last bit was the tricky bit. I pinned the lace around the skirt. Easy enough.
I stitched the bottom edge on with very little trouble. However, I ran into difficulty with the top edge. Being a tiered skirt, it gets narrower towards the top, presenting the obvious difficulty of the same length of lace needing to be stitched on over a shorter length of fabric! Added to this, the foot of my sewing machine was very kindly stretching my lace. Oh no! I had to unpick a few lengths where it was becoming distorted & I was ending up with far more lace than I had fabric to sew it onto. This was a delicate operation because the cotton fabric of the skirt is quite thin already, and the white cotton I was using for stitching was very close in colour to the thread used to make the lace. However, I managed it without doing any damage to either. I then pinned it again more carefully - about every inch - to ensure even distribution of lace over fabric, and very slowly machine-stiched the last bits into place.
Being all tiered and drapey, no one should notice the couple of tiny fudged bits. The overall effect is quite nice, and I'm just glad I can wear my skirt again. Perhaps one day I'll even crochet some more lace for the other tiers - but for now, I'm out of cotton!
