Lots of sewing!

True to form, I haven't been following the sewing plan I laid out in my last post.  But I'm about to get back on track.  Here's how I got off track in the first place...

I visited my sister in Kansas last month for a bit.  While there, she explained that she didn't have any skirts that fit her properly at the moment.  This is exactly what got me started sewing in the first place -- the desire to have a few simple skirts that fit well and didn't cost me an arm and a leg.   I would have made her one while visiting but she doesn't have a sewing machine, so I offered to make her two skirts when I got home.   I was also under a bit of a deadline because she and her husband are moving to Hawaii in mid-June and I wanted her to have the skirts before they left.

Last weekend I made one of the skirts, and this weekend I made the other.  The first is a six-gore skirt with side-seam pockets in a blue linen blend that I picked up at JoAnn Fabrics.  The second is a two-gore (is there such a thing?) skirt in a brown linen/rayon blend from Fabric.com.  While she chose the basic colors, I picked out the fabric.  I tried to stick with easy care fabrics that were light and breathed well.

Both are self-drafted and fairly simple with elastic waists (to minimize fitting issues given the distance between us and time table I was working under).  After looking at a few skirt tutorials, I decided to basically wing the design.  I decided against circle skirts because of the need to let the skirt hang for a good amount of time before hemming.  I also wanted to minimize the poofiness around the waist that gathered rectangles can give you.  I ended up with modified trapezoids that gave myself square edges at the waist and hem for ease of sewing the waistband and machine hemming.  The final skirt pieces looked a bit like this:

I tried to keep the seams as low-profile as possible, so I simply zigzagged over the edges to finish them.  While I'll have to wait for my sister to receive them and try them on, here's how they turned out:




Of course I'll have to wait for my sister to get them and try them on to know how well I did just based on her measurements, but hopefully the silhouette is simple enough and the waist forgiving enough that they'll look great.  Maybe she'll send me some fun shots of her wearing them in front of palm trees!

After finishing the blue skirt last weekend, I had to wait for the brown fabric to arrive in the mail.  So I decided to start a quick and simple project for myself in the meantime -- View A (short skirt) of McCall's 6073 with a pink floral jersey ITY knit I had ordered from Fabric.com during a sale ($2.99/yard) and had sitting in my stash for a while.  Unfortunately, "quick and easy" projects never seem to be all that quick for me.



I finally finished the dress today and I'm very happy with how it turned out overall, but it took me much longer than it should have.  Some of that was due to inattention, such as sewing two skirt pieces together so that the wrong side of the fabric was facing the right side.  Some of it was due to the extremely unclear directions for the neckband.  I pondered and arranged my pieces and simulated various translations of the directions and pondered some more for an hour or two on that one step alone.  Finally, I ignored  the directions completely for that step and just winged it.  However, given my perfectionist nature, I did pull out and redo the top stitching in several spots, especially around the v in the back neckline, multiple times.  The same is true of the arm holes.

Perfectionist tendencies aside, I also had to make some fitting adjustments as I went along.  I cut a straight size 8, although I did remove a bit of width from the back neckline before cutting.  I ended up having to make a swayback adjustment of 7/8" at center back.  Furthermore, I had to pull out the side waist seams and remove about 2" of ease from the back waist to help counteract the weight of the skirt pulling the bodice back away from my body.  Finally, I ignored the waist elastic (which may have contributed to the previous issue).  I haven't hemmed it yet (not sure I really need to, but I probably will eventually).  I'm planning to wear it to work tomorrow, and hopefully I'll have some modeled shots to show after I get home.  I'll take some detailed shots as well, the light was fading when I managed to grab this particular shot.

After finishing the dress and tossing it and the skirts into the wash to remove any remaining washable marker or loose threads, I popped in a twin needle and hacked 3" off the length fof a new Old Navy tank top/camisole.  I'm finding that most of my tops (especially from Old Navy) are just too long.  They sit around my butt, which is not a good look for anything other than possibly jeans.  I also don't really like to tuck in my tops.  They have a way of puffing out around my waist and working themselves out and generally distracting me all day long.  My modification of this tank seemed to work out pretty well, so I'll probably be doing more such modifications in the near future to make some of the items in my wardrobe more versatile.  I only wear jeans on the weekends when the temperature is below 80 degrees, so that means I don't wear them much at all for about 4 months of the year, and at most 2/7 days per week the other 8 months of the year.  I have way too many tops that I only feel comfortable wearing with jeans versus a relatively small amount of time when I can actually wear them.

In addition to all this sewing, I've been watching Lark Rise to Candleford, a BBC period drama set in two neighboring small towns, on YouTube.  Some kind soul has posted all the episodes (in 10 minute chunks) and I've made my way through Season 1 already.  It's quite possible that by the time my husband gets back on Thursday from the training exercise he left for last week, I'll be finished with Season 2 as well.  Let's hope I haven't gone crazy and finished all four seasons by then!