Pirate Wedding - Skirt 4

I don't know what I'm doing. I thought it would be so easy to just cut a hole in the round tablecloth, stick a zipper and a waistband on it, and there you go.

I cut the hole out. That was easy. But when I tried it on I discovered that the tablecloth covers all my lovely fringed layers. I tried bunching it up, but it was too bunchy. The diameter is too big. I experimented many ways of bunching, folding, etc. and all the messing around with the fabric caused the hole to stretch, so now it's like 5 inches bigger than my waist line. Which made it harder to try it on and drape accurately because I was having to overlap the cut edges where the zipper would be, but then anything I did to make it drape would be skewed when I sewed the final thing.

Well, I finally figured out a way to bunch it while maintaining the waist line that I want it to be (at least I think... I thought I was doing an accurate waist line on the underskirt and it's about 3 inches bigger than it should be, so now I need to make some sort of a yoke to attach it to and just drawstring it. How do these things happen?).

I bunched it and pinned it with giant quilting safety pins. I feel like that's a step in the right direction. However, I feel like it's proportionally wrong. Like, it seems unbalanced in proportion to everything else. Maybe it's the angle of the camera/mirror? I don't know.

 None of this would be a problem if I didn't have the plain cotton of the bedskirt showing above my fringed embellishments.

I thought about ripping out all the seams holding the gathers together on the underskirt and just basically cutting and pasting my overskirt material onto it and then gathering it up again. But then I remembered that the underskirt has 4 yards of fabric. And there's no way I'm getting 4 yards of fabric out of the overskirt!

I think I just need to sew some twill tape to hold the waistband for now, and then sew some ties to bustle it up in the front. And then hopefully the angels will sing and the overskirt will be done.