skirts

This is the first skirt I ever made. It is an airline blanket that I took with me to the Cornerstone Music Festival, back in the summer of 2001. It was extremely hot and, out of desperation and a newfound hatred of shorts, I sewed this skirt with a sewing kit someone from the next campsite had. It is probably still my favorite skirt even though it looks pretty junky. It's certainly gotten enough wear these past nine years! (wow, I'm old.)

If the airline blanket skirt is my favorite, my brown circle skirt is definitely second favorite. I found this vintage brown linen at a garage sale about four years ago and made my first circle skirt. As you can see, the hemline is very uneven, in fact it's not really a line at all! I did not really know what I was doing and so the sides are shorter than the front and back. But, if you know me, you know that doesn't bother me one bit. I think this is the main reason I've stuck with sewing for so long. When most people would get frustrated and rip something out, I would just say, "eh, it looks fine" and wear it. I have definitely come a long way though...

Here's a close-up of the tie and button to keep the opening closed. (notice the sloppy stitching)

And here is my next attempt at a circle skirt, which as you can see has an even hemline--hooray! I think this one is only two years old. But it doesn't get worn as often because everything goes with brown, and not everything goes with this blue.

So, the point of this post is two-fold:

1) Don't let yourself get overly frustrated if you're learning to sew. If you are, do one of two things, either stop sewing and come back to the project some other day (I do this a lot!) or just say to yourself, "no one else will notice this mistake, so I'm not going to care." and just leave it. (I know I'm making some of you cringe.)

2)I absolutely love and adore circle skirts because they are extremely easy to make and they're very full without having gathers. So I thought I would post a simple tutorial here sometime before the end of summer. Believe me, if you make a circle skirt, you'll fall in love too!

Do you have a favorite skirt? What style is it? What makes you love it?

wrap skirt

A friend and I went in together and bought Heather Ross's Weekend Sewing. This skirt is from the book and is actually on the front cover. I really like how it came out, and it's perfect for summer.



Unfortunately, I have to say that the pattern's instructions are not written correctly. The directions call for 6 panels of the skirt for the medium size--well, that does not fit around my waist, much less overlap itself. Of course I just got some more material and cut out 2 more panels. I also had to lengthen the waistband/tie. But I can see a beginning sewer having a real issue with this. I'm sure Heather Ross knows what she's doing. It seems like a lot of patterns get written wrong in the editing process of a book or magazine--how frustrating!

Have any of you run into this? Do you ever find yourself reading a store-bought pattern and think the people who wrote it were on drugs? I do!

Catching Up

It's been too long since I updated, I apologize for that. I lost my digital camera at Christmastime and that stopped me from blogging--but not from crafting! So I have a lot of catching up to do. (I just got a new camera.)

The most exciting thing I've been working on is this skirt. Unfortunately I only have pictures of the final product, but I started working on this in January. First, I wove the fabric out of birch gray and golden yellow cotton--the gray is in the warp and the yellow is in the weft. The color combination created an iridescent fabric (what I was going for), but the color mixing didn't come out as well as I'd hoped. It's kind of a tan/bronze/green/what-is-that-color-gross!!

Since I wove 8 yards of it (what was I thinking?!), I had to use it for something. I dug out an old skirt pattern I'd made years ago that has 15 gores and is very flared at the bottom. (Fun to spin around in.) I just happened to have exactly enough fabric to make it. I cut each piece out carefully and immediately surged it to the lining, a gray wool suiting fabric. Then I sewed all the gores together, hemmed it, made a waistband, and added a side zipper.

Well, it was boring. I spent at least a month trying to decide on how to decorate the hem. I really thought I would put some fancy golden yellow lace on it. Of course where do you find yellow lace? Nowhere. Then, I randomly found the exact color of lace I needed and... I didn't like it.
In the end I decided to make ruffles with the scrap pieces leftover from cutting. The pieces were shaped perfectly for irregular ruffles. Then I edged the ruffles with some yellow linen to make them stand out more.

The end result reminds me a lot of a Victorian walking skirt.
I hope you can see the iridescence in the pictures.