Sewing Question

Recently I have been on a sewing kick.  I guess I was inspired by Tony's cousin, Shannon Y., who recently opened an Etsy shop (click here) full of cute dresses and skirts for the toddler/young kid crowd.  My sister Megann has also given me lots of great ideas for sewing the last few months.  Anyway, I feel that I have been pretty successful at making simple things like Tag blankets (see example here...these aren't mine though) and customized burp cloths (see example here) (I actually got this idea from Shannon V. who gave me some fabulous burp cloths when J was born).  So I guess my success had to run out sometime.  I decided to try to make this super cute skirt for my niece Marley in the hopes that it would turn out beautifully and that I could then move on to making a couple for my nieces Ava and Brooklyn (Lisa, don't tell them, I would like to surprise them).  

Once I had the skirt put together and was trying to feed the elastic through the waist casing, it was abundantly clear that it was not going to work out as I had hoped.  The biggest thing is that the circumference of the skirt was much too large for a 12-month old size skirt.  I couldn't get the elastic to make it around the skirt.  Yikes! 

So my questions for all you seamstresses are:

Did I make the circumference too big by not following the instructions correctly?

 I measured just like it said and cut on the fold...

Are the instructions just really bizarre?....almost 72 inches around for a toddlers skirt.

Anyway, I ended up chopping circumference of the skirt in half and making a less fabric-y (is that a word?) skirt.  In the end, I still think it is a super cute skirt, just not as twirly as I had hoped.  I will post some pictures later, but I am baffled by this skirt.

Here are the pictures as promised

Here is the final skirt after the removal of the excess fabric.

And...here is all the excess fabric.  Like I said, YIKES!