A serger, a vacation, and a new skirt!

 Robert and I got back on Sunday from three weeks of vacation - a week with his grandparents and two weeks with my family in Denmark.  We had a lovely time, including a little backpacking trip with one of my cousins that was just lovely.  Before we left, I needed a bag to carry my sweater project in, and it was the perfect opportunity to use my new serger for the first time!  I'd had these two fat quarters of 30's-type fabric sitting around for quite a while, and this seemed like the perfect opportunity to use them:

 I especially love the little dogs on the green background.  I used the serger for everything except sewing the casing down for the ribbon drawstring.  I'm happy with the result, but I couldn't quite figure out how to get the raw edges at the drawstring to be finished.  Next time, I'll use this tutorial, which I found yesterday.  I think it looks really clever, and not too much extra work.

Sometime my senior year of high school, my mom bought me this skirt.  It was my favorite skirt all through college, until my first year of grad school, when I decided it was just too worn out to be worn anymore.  There were some holes in the outer skirt near the zipper, and all the years of washing and wearing had stretched the yoke out a bit, so that when I lost the weight I had gained in college the summer after graduation, I started having to use a safety pin to hold it up.  So when I saw some similar fabric at JoAnn about a year ago, I snatched up way too much of it, with the intention of making a replica.

 This being my favorite skirt, I was pretty nervous about messing up the replica, so I let it sit around for months and months, until this summer when I decided that what I really needed to do was sew myself some new clothes, and this was next in line.  So I cut out all the pieces and took it with me on vacation, and convinced Robert's Grandma (who is a sewing EXPERT) to help me with it.  It was so much fun to get to sew on her super-fancy Pfaff sewing machine, see how an expert uses the serger to make things more professional, and pick up some little tips and tricks.  The skirt turned out WONDERFULLY!  In one afternoon, we got everything finished except tacking the inner skirt down at the zipper and hemming the inner and outer skirts. 

Yesterday I sat down and finished it.  I just did a rolled hem for the outer skirt, and then I cut off the ruffle from the lining of the old skirt, trimmed the inner skirt to the right length, serged the inner skirt, and attached the ruffle.  Here's the new skirt.  It's very close to how the old skirt was, with the improvement of pockets!