06 April 2011

Simple skirt and the proverbial wild hair

Yesterday, hot on the heels of my pillowcases victory, I started up another quick and easy project: a simple skirt.  This turned out to be a mild variation of my "no-pattern tube skirt" that I've made up a few times last year where I take either 2 or 3 yards, sew it into a tube, cut off excess then hem and put in an elastic waistband ... or if I want to get fancy like my red petticoats for Renn Faire, pleat the top into a waistband.  I wasn't feeling fancy last evening or this morning, so simple elastic waistband it is:
From selvage to selvage, without any trimming, this ended up being ankle-length after hemming and putting in the waistband, which is cool because I haven't made one that long except my petticoats.  This is the $1/yd cotton I scored last week ... I swear it really did jump into my cart and cry for me to take it home!  LOL  It's all 3 yards at the bottom ... but only about 2 yards at the top.  That's the variation - I trimmed out "darts" of sort so I wouldn't have so much bulk around the waist, fabric-wise.  I folded it into four, then tapered off 1.5" inches off each side using the next-to-bottom set of stripes as my taper point:
Then I just sewed up the triangles, then the open side, pressed, hemmed, and this morning put in the elastic waistband.  Another easy, fast, instant-gratification project.

As for the proverbial wild hair ... everyone has probably figured out I hate housecleaning, *but* I wanted to find a specific summer knit top to wear with this new skirt.  I haven't seen it since this past September ... so what started as a shirt hunt morphed into a massive clothing-sort of all my warm-weather stuff.  I have another full bag of clothing to donate, and a whole heap of laundry to wash ... and a big bare spot that hubby won't help but notice when he gets home.  Once I get that top washed and dried I can take a shower, because even though it's called "cleaning" I always end up so dirty after doing it.

The next big question will be "What do I want to sew now?"

2 comments:

Imaan said...

Looks great, can you show a pic of the grading from bottom hem edge to the waist? I want to make myself something like that too, but lack courage!

dfr2010 said...

Imaan - I didn't taper it all the way down to the bottom hem, as I wanted that the full 3 yards. I stopped at the set of stripes between the bottom and middle band of designs, about 2/3 of the way down, so the fabric was uncut for the bottom 1/3 of its width. I am still not sure how I thought 12 inches = 1 yard the other night, but my take-away lesson is to not do math after dinner! LOL

This was an impulse fabric buy and an impulse project, so there was next to no planning put into it ... best I can say is grab some very inexpensive thin fabric and experiment. I've got a black Bombay cotton skirt that didn't go as planned (fabric too heavy for the waistband) that I only wear around the house as an example of an experiment that didn't go as hoped.