Basic skirt block

So now I have finished the bodice, and given that I don't want to use the skirt that comes with the pattern, I need to come up with an alternative for the bottom half of the dress. As this is going to be a pencil or tulip type skirt (I think) I thought I better figure out how to draw a basic skirt block. Luckily I found this awesome tutorial on drawing a basic skirt block on the Fashion Era site I used to produce my own custom-sized skirt block patterns.

I then made it up in black cotton as per the instructions, and just basted in a zip (which was about 5cm too short as it turns out - nightmare wriggling in and out of the thing!) - when I'd sewn it together it turned out that the curve I'd drawn from the waist to the hip was not shallow enough (ie was too curvy) and that made the toile a bit baggy around the hips. So I re-stitched that bit of the side seam (starting at the original seam on the waist and ending crossing the original seam at the hips - couldn't be faffed with unpicking the whole lot) at on each side, probably less than a centimetre from the first seam I'd sewn, and tried it on again and it was just about perfect. I transferred this adjustment back on to my master pattern by putting the pattern piece on top of the garment (inside out) and marked the pattern piece, trimming off the excess... not sure if there is a more scientific approach (the tutorial said something like "transfer all adjustments you make to the toile to the pattern" - not very explicit!) but hopefully it will have worked for the next one! I made the block knee length so I can cut the patterns shorter if necesssary.

When on, the shape of the toile looks fab from the front, but it's a bit meh at the back - it has two darts at the waist which give a nice simple shape but it seems to just hang a bit once you get to the ass area... I guess this is only supposed to be a plain block which you then do stuff to. So now I am trying to find instructions on putting in a slit at the back or something...