Just a quickie, because we’re mostly on repeats now.
Day 19 – The Counterintuitive Black Bird Skirt
I’m still not fed up with this skirt- I love the birdies!
Day 20 – The Black Denim Skirt
Another view of my office
Day 21 – The Minnie Mouse Skirt
It’s a full circle!
Day 22 – You’ve already seen the Pretty Splodges Summer Skirt
Here it is again
I decided it would be unrealistic for me to post every single day in May, as well as getting a bit samey for anyone reading, so I’ll try and do the outfit posting in blocks.
Day 2 – My Minnie Mouse Skirt
Day 2 – Channelling Minnie Mouse
I made this skirt a couple of years ago, when I first started thinking about sewing my own clothes again. It was the easiest quickest make EVAH! Just a circle with a hole in it, some 3″ wide black elastic made into a waistband, and because it’s a really stable jersey I never even bothered to even hem it. Two years on and countless washes and wears later the “hem” is still absolutely fine! It’s always been the Minnie Mouse Skirt, for obvious reasons. One of these days I’ll fish out the scraps and make myself a big red and white dotty hair bow.
This is one of my rare forays into a different colour family- usually I’ll stick with pinks/purples and turquoise/teal/greens. I have a couple of reds in my wardrobe, and this is one of them. I usually integrate red in with black (my go-to neutral), as I did here, but you’ may be seeing the Minnie Mouse reappearing later this month with some of the turquoise/teal/greens.
I wore this outfit to my volunteer job (I help at a local mental health charity on Fridays) and it was making my boss giggle! The Friday Photo theme on the MMM14 Flickr pool was “Cocktail Hour”, so this is me after work, in my local, the Stoke, enjoying an end-of-the-week Rioja. The photo was kindly taken by the Gentleman Friend, who put up with me bossing him about directing him from in front of the camera (“You’ve got to make sure the skirt is showing. Yes all of it. That’s the whole point of taking these photos!”).
Day 3 – the Denim Skirt
Day 3 – Denim
This was one of my early blogged makes. It’s a black denim with a pale pink weft. Do I mean weft? I mean the thread that goes across the weave of the material and in the case of denim creates the back colour on the wrong side of the fabric- white in normal blue-jeans-denim, but in this case pink. I love that the inside of this skirt is a lovely sheeny pink, and the right side is rough tough denim with a slight hint of pink. I’m thinking of upgrading this skirt. I picked up a gorgeous silky embroidery thread when I was in Penzance, and I’ve received some embroidery patterns from a giveaway, so that’s put some ideas in my head. I need to think it through.
I also realised later that it was another Twofer day- I made the hair flower clips I was wearing. Nothing terribly clever, just some silk orchids, some hair clips and a well-deployed hot glue gun.
Hair flowers – it’s really hard taking a selfie of the back of your head!
Day 4 – the Red Square Skirt
I’m seeing a theme emerging here- it’s been all skirts! I don’t have many me-made tops (yet), but there will be some seeing the light of day this month, I’m sure. Anyway, it was a nice enough day today to pull out the Red Square Skirt which until now has been rather too thin for the weather.
MMM Day 4 – the Red Square Skirt
Today you get a different view of the car park at my flat. My usual spot, which is a bit more discreet, was catching the sun beautifully and the photos were coming out completely washed out, so I had to change my angle. I think this is the first photo of the skirt on this blog that has shown its correct colour.
I mentioned above how I try to integrate my colours, but for now I don’t see much colour co-ordination happening with this one. It’s very starkly red & black. I think I can possibly bring in a white, maybe rock a zebra print top with it (if I had one). Another thing to put on the To Sew Sometime list.
In my last post I was explaining that I’d actually got going with this, and now, happily, it’s all finished.
It looks a bit short in the first photo, because I can’t really do perspective when I take pictures. And it’s draped over the side of my bed. And it’s wide, because I’m a big girl. It’s a respectable just below the knee length.
Black denim skirt
Hem, showing how pretty the pink inside is
The obligatory just as neat inside shot
And here it is on
I think I’d better establish from the outset, I’m rubbish at selfies.
Things of note:
1) I did a lapped zip, my first one. I’m not 100% happy with it, but I’m not going to beat myself up over this- it’s the first time I’ve done a zip in years.
2) I did the topstitch sewing in bright pink, for fun.
3) I toyed with the idea of doing fun facings, in a different fabric, but I wanted the top of the skirt to be well-structured, so the denim it was.
4) I was good, and finished all the innards. Denim frays like woah!
5) I used up all the denim, no scraps left, so that’s reduced the stash a bit, and makes me feel better.
My favourite thing about this?
Apart from general pride at making a nice skirt? This skirt is *really* comfortable!
A few weeks ago, I spent ages tinkering with a skirt pattern, to get it to fit me. It’s nothing amazing or complicated, it’s just a straight skirt, using McCalls 3830, which is pretty much as simple as a straight skirt can possibly get.
I made the pattern fit my actual dimensions, with a little bit of ease. I didn’t want it to be a loose straight skirt. I have a rounded bottom, and a poochy belly, but my hips are fairly narrow, so I don’t need quite so much curve from waist to hip.
Tonight I’ve cut out and sewn the skirt, in the black/pink denim, to see whether it works. And I’m happy to report it does! I’m using View C, the slightly below the knee version.
Having mucked around with the basic skirt pattern, tweaking the hip curve, fettling the darts, I wasn’t too sure how I was going to handle altering the facings. I thought I could possibly make this with a waistband, which is how I always used to make straight skirts when I was a teenager, because that would have avoided the whole issue of facings altogether. But once I had the body of the skirt put together, it became clear that I could use *that* to draft the facings, which is what I’ve done, so I don’t need to worry about that in the future, next time I use this pattern.
The skirt is not finished yet. I’ve still got to do all the hand sewing- sorting out the final messing around with the facing, and hemming. But I can get those done tomorrow, I reckon.
I’m definitely going to be using this pattern again- I’m partial to a straight skirt. I feel sure that I can also use this basic skirt shell to convert it into an A-line skirt, if I feel the wish to venture into more flared territory. And I’m wondering if I can do the opposite alteration, narrowing the side seam to make the skirt more “pencil”. Now that I’ve done all the hard work of altering the pattern, I feel like this is an easy option project!
Béa's Sewing Adventures 