Spring is here - at least in skirt form anyway...

Well I have been showing sneak peeks of this skirt for so long that I am just relieved to finally be able to mark this project as finished and be able to share it on the blog!

This is the first pattern that I have used from Gertie's New Book For Better Sewing. It is a classic pencil skirt but with 4 front darts rather than the usual 2 and once again I have found a pattern that required next to no adjustments (WIN!). I think the main change I made was to significantly shorter the pattern as I don't really like the look of skirts below my knee (unless it's a maxi of course).

The fabric was the very same fabric that I featured in a recent "Make It Yourself", however, I bought mine from Truro so paid the higher price. I only discovered that Fabric Land stocked the same fabric for a cheaper price after I had made my purchase. To be honest though, when I say higher price, it didn't really break the bank! As soon as I spotted it on the Truro website I had to have it, without really knowing what I was going to make out of it (I have to admit, that is how I tend to buy fabric…which probably isn't the smartest way to shop!). It is a lovely cotton sateen with a nice amount of stretch, which means it is really comfortable to wear. The only down side is that it tends to wrinkle very quickly, as you can see in these photos!

The skirt is lined in a bright pink lining which I trimmed in some very cute lace. I also hemmed the skirt by sewing on a very sweet pink grosgrain ribbon, turning it up and blind stitching in place. That's the main reason why the skirt took so long to finish - I tend to procrastinate a LOT when it comes to hand stitching…and hemming. But you guys know that about me already, since I think I mention it in almost every blog post!!

There is a very small slit at the back (you can't quite see it in the above pic unfortunately) which I think I should have made a little bit longer. I normally put a vent in the back of my fitted skirts, but forgot when I was cutting this one out. It's not a very tight fit though so no big loss really. There is also a bright pink invisible (or perhaps, not so invisible - whoops!) zip and the waistband closes with a classic hook and bar. I find that hook and bar closures can sometimes pull out of shape a little and recently I read that adding an internal button and loop can add that little bit of extra support to the waistband and stop that pulling so I may add this to the skirt at some stage, and will definitely be adding this to my next pencil skirt.

The colours in these photos are not quite true to life, as they are making the orange a tad deeper and brighter than it really is - but saying that, it is still a pretty bright skirt!! Also I promise that the top does actually match one of the pink shades in the skirt, even if it doesn't appear to in these photos!!

I am really pleased with how well this pattern has fitted me and am marking it as a 'TnT' pattern for me, which is pretty exciting considering I wouldn't say I actually have too many of those! As I mentioned in a previous post I have already cut out another 3 pencils skirts to make, and this is the pattern I have chosen. So I'm hoping I will be able to whizz through the construction for them pretty quickly. If I do manage that in the next couple of weeks then I'm thinking I might try my hand at Me Made May. I gave  it a go a few years ago (when it was Self Stitched September!) but failed miserably due to having very little to actually choose from. Perhaps if I get the pencil skirts done I'll stand a better chance of making it through the month. We shall see!

Details:

Pattern:   Pencil Skirt from Gertie's New Book For Better Sewing   £12.75

Fabric:    Orange Floral Cotton Sateen from Truro                           £18 (£9/m)

                 Pink Lining                                                                        £3

Notions:  Zip                                                                                     £1.89

                Thread                                                                                £0 - Stash!

                Grosgrain Ribbon                                                               £0 - Stash!

                Lace for hemming lining                                                    £0 - free gift

    

Total = £35.64

Oh gosh, I really need to stop adding up the true costs for my projects - I was enjoying my blissful ignorance as to how much things were really costing me!! But not to worry, my future skirts will work out a lot better since I won't be adding the cost for the book - phew!

Oh and I'm totally claiming this as a stash bust since I have had that fabric for AGES! Yeay! Love bustin' that stash (gives me an excuse to buy more!!).

Oh and the lovely Katy was inspired by my "Make It Yourself" and made her very own version of the skirt - it is brilliant so make sure you check it out (P.S. I promise we didn't take our photos together - although it totally looks like it!)! And if anyone else fancy getting there hands on a bit of this lovely fabric? If so, she is also offering 1.5m of it in a giveaway! 

Under The Needle

So even though things are a little quite on the blog at the moment, things are pretty busy in the sewing room! I thought I’d share some sneaks peaks…

On Instagram the other week I revealed that I have FINALLY jumped on the Anna (By Hand London) bandwagon:

I’ve been working on this dress for the Sew Dolly Clackett competition and I am sooo in love with it – now I can appreciate the hype that this dress was receiving when it first came out! Here’s a sneak at the fabric I’ve used:

I cannot WAIT to get some photos done so that I can share it with you. I just have the hem and a LOT of hand sewing to do first (doh – my two biggest nemeses!)…

As well as the Anna dress, I recently decided to give ‘production line’ sewing a go. So I currently have 2 Plantain tops and 4 pencil skirts cut out and waiting for me to stitch up! Expect to see Plantains in these fabulous knits appearing soon:

And these are 3 of my planned pencil skirt:

  

I’m hoping that sewing the skirts at the same time will mean I get things done faster and procrastinate less! Hmm…watch this space…

What are you working on at the moment?
Anyone else joining in with the Sew Dolly Clackett competition fun?
Have you ever sewn up a pattern in multiple fabrics at the same time and how did you find it?

Jenny Skirt

So as I mentioned in my post last week, I may have been away from blog-land but I have still been sewing, so I have a few finished projects that I need/want to post about. Today let's check out my finished Jenny pencil skirt!

 

Making a pencil skirt was actually on my 12 in 2012 list, which some of you might remember, and I did manage to get this finished in 2012. I actually had most of it sewn up ages ago, but it sat in my sewing room waiting to be hemmed forever! Why do I fear/loathe hemming so much? Whenever I do eventually get myself around it, it's never quite as horrific as I'm expecting. Saying that though, I'm not actually happy with how I hemmed this skirt. The skirt is lined with a fun bright pink (a colour which seems to appear quite regularly on this blog!) poly lining and due to the vent at the back I wasn't really sure how best to hem the lining and the actual skirt fabric. In the end I serged the lining and then treated the lining as one and turned them up together and then slip stitched the skirt to the lining fabric. It looked good. But then when I went out wearing my skirt and sat down, the fact that the skirt fabric could move around meant that the hem would droop a bit, which I don't like. So I wouldn't recommend doing that!!

I'm quite pleased with out these photos turned out (sorry if they are a bit grainy though - indoors, after work, during UK winter!!), they make me think that I should wear this skirt more often. However, looks can be deceiving unfortunately. I just find the large waistband on the Jenny skirt far too high on me. I have quite a short torso and this skirt doesn't do me any favours! The skirt section is good though, so perhaps I should try again with a narrower waistband, which I see being done quite a bit on other blogs.

It goes really well with one of the cowl tops I've made, so I'm pleased about that (that was a fluke, but I guess I'm drawn to certain colours, so it is perhaps inevitable!). 

 

Not too much to say about the project really. So I shall leave you with a sneak peek at another project I finished last year:

 

 

Thai Scalloped Pencil Skirt

 

  Well, my computer decided to die, but fortunately Robin knew a guy who was able to fix it – AND save all our photos (THANK GOD!!!!!), so I’m able to post up my last project. This is the Burda 6889 pencil skirt that I have had highlighted at the side of my blog since I updated the look. I had made up a muslin for this ages ago and decided it was pretty much the perfect basic pencil skirt pattern for me – I didn’t even need to do any alterations at all (yeay!). The fabric is a gorgeous bright pink eyelet that I bought on my trip to Thailand last year. I only had a metre to play with so it’s a lot shorter than the pattern suggests for the length, but I think it’s fine (although, perhaps a little short when I sit down!). The skirt is lined with matching pink lining, which I actually treated as underlining as I thought it would be easier. I hemmed each piece of ‘lining’ before basting with it’s matching eyelet piece and then treated as one. It worked out really well, and together with the lovely serged seams, makes the skirt look really neat and rather professional inside! Still loving my overlocker!

In these photos I’ve paired it with my self-drafted purple cowl top, and I think they work really well together – something I wasn’t planning on, but I’m delighted with the result! Hey guys – I’ve made an outfit! Wooo! lol!

 

I spent a lot of time working out the pattern placement and measuring the scallops to ensure that the hem would match up. I am so delighted with the results:

Even the back seam is a perfect match:

Because the skirt is tapered, the rest of the seam doesn’t match up (plus I discovered that the flipping circle pattern didn’t line up with the grain!!!), but I decided it was more important to make sure the scallop of the hem was perfect.

I really love this skirt, and I’m planning on using the same pattern to make a skirt from the turquoise eyelet fabric that I also bought in Thailand. I’m not, however, 100% about the fit. If you look at the image on the front of the pattern, the waistband doesn’t actually sit right on the waist of the model, and the same goes for my skirt. So for all intents and purposes, it’s correct. But I just have the feeling that this skirt would look better on me if it was sitting at my waist. Which is something I’m really surprised I’m saying, because I have, for most of the fashion-conscious part of my life, always avoided wearing waistbands on my true waist. I have always felt that I have quite a short torso, and thus having the waistbands of things (skirts/trousers) lower, makes it look like my body is more in proportion. However, over the last year or so, I have really felt my opinion of this change and I have found myself reaching for waist-cinching belts, and wearing clothes that really accentuate my waist. Is that down to current fashions trends? Learning to sew and appreciating my body shape? Or perhaps loosing some weight and being happier with my proportions? Probably a bit of all of those options!

Whatever the answer, I think I am going to take in this skirt so that it sits at my waist. It will make it an inch or so shorter, but I think that should be OK. I’ll wear it with a killer pair of shoes for nights out!

Ringing up the curtain for 2012!

Well I finally have a finished project for 2012 – and it’s pretty much on schedule for my personal goal to make 12 items this year (see 12 in 2012).

I showed a few sneak-peaks of this make on my Instagram/Twitter account, and more recently on my blog:

 

Although this wasn’t one of the garments I specified on my 12 in 2012 list, I left myself 5 ‘wildcards’ to allow a bit of flexibility throughout the year. This skirt is view A of McCall’s M5591 (the main skirt shown on the front of the pattern in the photo on the left above) and the fabric is actually a piece of curtain remnant that I picked up from my local fabric/curtain making shop (The Spinning Wheel) for about £1.50 (hence the title of this blog post). Being curtain fabric it’s quite heavy duty so I thought pleats would work quite well, and they do.

I made up a very quick muslin of this skirt because for some reason I bought the pattern in sizes 6 – 12, and the measurements for the waist and hips for size 12 was a couple of inches smaller than my own measurements! Luckily, the pattern ran very big (as they often seem to do) and there was a lot of ease…and size 12 made up was a perfect fit for my waist!

View A has really roomy slash pockets (for info views B and C have in-seam pockets) including a very smart pocket binding (erm, not sure what it’s officially called!) which I think could look really good made up in a contrasting fabric (I didn’t do this – but just making a note in case I decide to make this again!). As i said, I was working with a remnant piece so I didn’t really have very much to play with and thought some pieces might have to be made out of another fabric, but with very careful placing, I was able to get every piece out of the same fabric! I even managed to get the pattern running along the same line at the front and the back. They don’t match perfectly at the seams (which, as you know, is something I like to try and do – see this post), but considering what I had to work with I’m actually pretty amazed with how well the pattern does match up!

So, to summarise:

Fabric: Curtain Remnant £1.50

Notions: Regular Zip 60p

Techniques:

• Pleating…Knife pleats and Inverted Box pleats
• Hand-picked Zip (on my 12 in 2012 list!)  - WOW…so easy and looks great – I’m definitely a convert!!
• Bound edge of slash pocket
• Serged seams, and a serged hem turned up once and sewn down – so easy!! I decided to do it that way to keep the thickness of the hem to a minimum (enjoying the perks of the overlocker already!).

Pros: The instructions are very easy to follow and it’s quite a simple skirt to make with no adjustments necessary (whoop!)

Cons: The pleats take a lot of pinning to make sure they are sitting just right. Plus this fabric creases like there is no tomorrow so there is a lot of ironing to do before it looks decent enough to wear!

Make Again: Hmm…ironing pleats is not my favourite thing to do so I won’t be making it again in the near future (plus there are so many other projects on my waiting list!!).

***Top Tip: be careful when pinning through thick fabric – pricking yourself and bleeding onto your garment fabric. Not a good idea!!!***

I made it…AND I wore it! 3

Necklace - present, Cardigan - Primark, Vest - Zara, Skirt - Me, Shoes - Clarks, Cute Kitty Canvas - c/o my lovely man as a Christmas pressie!

This week for my IMIAIWI (catchy no? Ha) challenge I decided to wear one of the first things I ever made - my navy blue skirt with a red trim. Being Winter, I had to pair the skirt with thick tights and since this skirt is made out of basic cotton I wore a half slip underneath to stop the dreaded skirt-riding-up-on-tights look. Sigh. It didn't work. Any time spent walking I also spent pulling down the skirt while acting like nothing was wrong and I wasn't secretly hoping that no one could see my knickers! And another bad thing about wearing clothes made of pure cotton - wrinkles! This skirt is wrinkled beyond belief the moment you sit down in it once.

So I have decided that I'm getting rid of this skirt. I'm probably going to salvage the button and the zip, and then I'm just going to chuck it! And I'm not sad at all. I do think that the skirt looks very nice in all the photos I have of it, but in real life it just doesn't work. It served a very important purpose at the time, a stepping stone along the way to learning how to sew, but there really is little point in keeping it now - it's just taking up space in my wardrobe where something more useful could be hanging!

The great thing about this challenge is that, as well as forcing me to wear my handmade clothes, I'm finally getting a feeling of what's good and what's not - and that's the whole point of doing this. The other thing I'm noticing is that I have a definite 'style', which I actually wasn't aware of - quarter-length sleeve fitted cardi anyone??!! I can't believe I have noticed this after only 3 outfits! Oh dear...I think I need to experiment a little!

 And here's a shot in my 'sewing room' (aka loft conversion/storage room/boyfriends laundry room!). No, I didn't bother tidying up (this shot is actually quite tidy)...I'm keeping it real man, keeping it real!

Q. Have you ever got rid of your handmade things? Did you feel sad to see them go, or did you find it liberating?

I made it...AND I wore it! 2

On to the second edition of "I made it...AND I wore it". This time it's a bit of a dark picture, so apologies for that - but at least it's an 'action' shot - proof that the outfit definitely was worn out of the house! I wore my Autumn Fireworks Skirt  for travelling to London last Friday and the meet-up with the girls. Here I am  relaxing in the Duke of Cumberland, admiring my recent Goldhawk Rd purchases over a glass of red (keeping the red a safe distance of course, especially from the white cotton silk!).

Necklace - Dorothy Perkins, Vest - Zara, Cardi - Primark, Skinny belt - New Look, Skirt - Me, Tights - Primark. Cheesy Smile - courtesy of exposure to an extreme amount of fabric!

Tuesday’s Tutorial Treat – Gorgeous Smocked Skirt

The latest love on the sewing blogosphere at the moment seems to be the beautiful patterns from Victory Patterns. I’m sure most of you have now heard of these, but if not, do check them out – they are really lovely. My favourite is probably Hazel, or Ava…but it’s hard to choose, they are all lovely!

Do check out the blog too – it seems to be early days there, but already there is the most gorgeous tutorial for a smocked skirt up, which I’m sharing as our Tutorial Treat for today:

Link HERE

I haven’t included smocking in my 12 in 2012 new sewing skills list…but now I’m tempted to swap it for something else I’ve got in the list!

Tuesday's Tutorial Treat - Reversible Scallop Skirt

I missed out last Tuesday - whoops!

Anyway, we are back with a very cute tutorial today. Scallops seemed to take the blog world by storm this year and the trend is still very much going strong. Carrying on from that here is a very clever tutorial to make a reversible scallop miniskirt by Meream from Bored and Crafty:

Click Here

Autumn Fireworks Skirt

Hello! I disappeared last week didn't I! Sorry about that but I seemed to lose my sewing and blogging Mojo for a bit. I guess life does that to you sometimes.

Anyway, although I have lost my sewing Mojo a bit, I did manage to whip up a quick skirt - and I mean quick! I found a length of jersey in the remnant bin in my local fabric shop for £3 and although I have never sewn with jersey before I just couldn't pass it by! So because this was my first foray into sewing with jersey I kept it nice and simple and just made a gathered skirt with an elastic waist. And as proof as to how easy I kept it....I cut it so that the hem was the selvedge, which reduced the chances of crappy sewing!!!

Another 'location photo-shoot' - this time I'm at the Hillsborough Fort. If you ever get a chance of coming to Northern Ireland I definitely recommend a short visit to the town of Hillsborough - probably one of the prettiest towns we have, with lovely little shops, cafes, traditional pubs...oh and a castle which the Queen stays in when she comes to N.I!

Unfortunately, I have discovered that my sewing machine has started acting up so I need to take it in for a service. No idea when I will back up and running, but hopefully not for too long as I have lots of projects waiting to be started! I guess I can do all the tracing and cutting prep while I wait so that I can launch into sewing as soon as the machine is back.

P.S. I have another reason why I haven't been sewing very much recently...I shall post about it later this week! Prepare for cuteness overload!

Summer Fields Skirt - My Crescent Skirt revealed!

Well I had planned to unveil my completed Crescent Skirt last Friday, but my iron broke (major catastrophe for a stitcher!!!) and I had to wait until this weekend to finish it off. My boyfriend and I took a little picnic trip to Murlough Bay (a National Trust spot) which is literally where the 'Mountains of Mourne sweep sown to the sea' - so I thought this would be the perfect opportunity to get some interesting photos:

Slieve Donard in the background - the highest point in the Mournes (and the whole of Northern Ireland).

 

 I promise these shots were taken after the purchasing and using of a new iron...but sitting in a car for an hour prior to photo shoot is not conducive to iron-free clothes!

 

I happened to have some red ribbon (with white stitching detail on it) in my stash so I decided to go for the trim version of the skirt. I made View A, which was less full skirt and I think it turned out just about the right amount of 'poofiness' for me (yes, very high-tech sewing terminology there!)

I decided to fully line my skirt as I know cotton skirts have a very naughty habit of creeping up when worn with tights (and believe me, it's nearly back to tight season here!). I went for a bright pink acetate lining and trimmed it with a very pale pink lace that I had in my stash. I really love this little delicate feature - it makes me smile whenever I see it peaking out from under the skirt! I also turned up the hem with red ribbon (you can just about make it out in the photo above) - again another feature that I love. One of the good things about it was I felt the full hem allowance would have been too short for me, so this allowed me to squeeze a little extra length into the skirt!

And some shots of the skirt on Flo:

 Hmmm....my least favourite part of the skirt - my sewing around the zip. Ah well, it's all a learning curve isn't it - next time I will be a lot neater!

 Close-up of the trim

The lining, with the sweet lace trim. I love the fact that most of the skirt is finished off with French Seams (more on that tomorrow - but not what you think!), including the lining - I made a point of doing that...the lining fabric frays like a demon!

 

I have to admit that when I started this skirt I thought it might end up too girly and poofy for me....but it turns out I'm obviously more girly than I thought because I love wearing this skirt! Another naughty fact - I couldn't be bothered making a toile/muslin and while piecing the waistband together I had a mini panic that it was going to be FAR too tiny on me and I almost didn't bother finishing it! It turns out that the size is spot on - well done Tasia for drafting such a perfect pattern that actually matches your body measurements without giving us 10 inches of ease!!!

I am definitely going to get a lot of wear out of this skirt...and perhaps we may see a few more pop up in my wardrobe soon. You can never have too many skirts right?