normally a pocket on a pair of pants is 3 inner pieces, held in place by the waistband, the side seam, and the front of the garment at the pocket opening. there's a pocket front piece and a pocket back piece and a little facing piece that is made from the same material as the body of the garment so as to disguise the pocket a little. go ahead and look at your pants. i'll give you a sec.

see? ok, so now that you've understood that, and how the pocket stitches to the side seam of your garment with the curvy bit of the pocket in the front, pointing toward the center seam, imagine that all backward.

apparently when they drafted out the pockets for this skirt they decided that the straight edge of the pocket which is normally along the side seam should instead be stitched into a seam running down the middle of the front of my leg, with the rounded bit pointing back, toward the side seam. essentially, they drafted the pockets backward.

so last night i assembled the pockets in the orientation i expected, with the facing piece lining up with the flat edge which i figured should go along the side seam. i got the coin pocket put on, i got the front of the pocket attached to the front of the skirt, i got the front and back pocket pieces stitched together, i got everything top stitched, i flipped over the pocket pieces to look and them and realized that somehow the facing pieces were pointing the wrong direction.

instead of following the curve of the pocket, as they should have been, they were opposite, exposing the white of the pocket lining, instead of covering it up.

the problem is that the facing piece was self-drafted. according to the pattern, the back pocket piece should have been made out of the garment body material (denim in this case) rather than something like muslin with a smaller facing piece. this wouldn't have worked for me, since i didn't have enough denim, plus it just seemed weird, so i just cut out the pattern piece from my last 3 pairs of pants and went to town.

since these pockets are apparently drafted backward, i now have to take apart the whole back of each pocket and figure out how to modify my facing pieces to a different shape and hope it still covers properly because i don't have enough material to do it again.

thanks for the curve-ball, mccall's! i really needed that. :(