Half-slip

When we lived in Texas, I used to wear skirts almost every day.  But in the midwestern winter (even the mild one we just had), it's much too cold to have bare legs, so I ordered a couple of pairs of Smartwool tights.  They are wonderful, but almost all of my skirts and dresses are un-lined light-to-medium weight cotton, and they ride up when I wear tights. I only have one skirt that's heavy enough to wear with tights and no slip.

So I made myself a half-slip using some Bemberg rayon I had bought for another project that I'm not sure will ever get made.  I followed Gertie's tutorial.  I cut two rectangles, each 25" wide and 19" long (which is wider than the tutorial suggests for my hip measurement, but I was worried about wearing ease, and I think I made the right call - I need to be able to walk to work, climb stairs, and generally feel comfortable walking around while I'm teaching).  I used French seams and a double narrow hem at the bottom.

I used a bit of lavender picot-edge elastic that I had leftover from making several pairs of undies, and I didn't use any lace or bows.

The rayon is super slippery, and the slip works really well!  It was kind of difficult to cut and sew the rayon accurately, but given the non-public nature of this project, I don't think it matters that it isn't perfect.

A purse and a skirt!

 At the beginning of the summer (around this time) I started feeling like I had too many projects and too much stuff and I made an intention to work through my UFO list and get some stuff finished.  My loose plan was that I should finish two projects for every one I started.  Since then, I have not finished a single thing on my UFO list, but I have started and finished the Lone Star baby quilt for my soon-to-be-niece, the Kindle case for Robert's birthday, this little purse, and the navy skirt at the bottom of this post.  I've also started a larger version of the purse because this one is too small.  As you can see in the picture below, it is overfull with my wallet, ipod, keys, chapstick, phone, and my university wallet/keychain.  With these things in it, it will not close, and I also need it to fit my sunglasses. 

 The purse is the Buttercup Bag from Made by Rae.  It's a free pattern, and very cute.  My plan is to use this one for going to the symphony and other date nights, when I don't want to carry a huge bag and don't need to have so many things with me.

I'm planning some significant enhancements on the larger version - a zipper closure, an inside zipped pocket, and one or two inside pockets with elastic on the top.  I'm not quite sure how to explain the elastic pockets, but I've seen in on some tote bag patterns, and I think it's just the thing to make 3-dimensional space inside the pockets and prevent things from falling out of them at the same time. 

Here's my navy skirt.  This has actually been on my future projects list for a while, and I used some really great coupons at Joann to get the fabric and elastic really inexpensively.  The whole skirt (including thread that I didn't have in the right color) was about $10.  I expected the skirt to go together in an hour or two, but as usual everything took longer than I expected.  I put in pockets and tried to use the rolled hem foot on my sewing machine to do the hem.  Even though I practiced on scraps, the hem just didn't turn out.  I need lots more practice before I can use that tool on a garment.  It took quite a while to pick out the rolled hem and re-do it with my usual "turned under twice and topstitched" hem. 

I couldn't get a picture of myself with the skirt on, but here it is.  The elastic is two inches wide and sits (pretty loosely) on my hips.  I probably should have cut the elastic for the waistband about two inches shorter, and I might go back later and do that, but for now I'm too lazy and it works fine the way it is, especially if I wear a longer top over it. 

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!

Starting a new skirt

This past weekend I started a new skirt.  I have an old damask-print skirt that I got my senior year of high school, and it was my very favorite skirt all through college.  Needless to say, by the time I got to grad school it was pretty much worn out.  So I was overjoyed when I was browsing at JoAnn one day many months ago, and I saw a damask print that pretty well approximates the print on my old skirt, and I decided to try to recreate it. 

I'm using another variation of the pattern I used for my first brown skirt, McCall's 5591, but I had to adapt it to make the skirt less full, since the original pattern pieces are too wide to fit across grain, but this print is definitely directional, so that won't work.  Also, my old skirt has a ruffle at the bottom of the lining which I'm planning to re-use, so I want the new skirt to be about the same fullness as the old one so the proportions work out. 

So far, I've cut out the outer skirt pieces, the pockets, and the yoke pieces.  I've Ironed the white fabric for the lining, but I need to adjust the skirt pattern pieces for that and cut them out.  I stopped at JoAnn on my way home today and bought the zipper, but I forgot to get embellishing braid for the seam between the yoke and the skirt.  I still need to cut out the interfacing for the yoke, and, of course, sew it all together!

Denim Skirt

One of the MANY things I did this weekend (along with going to Robert's brother's graduation, helping Robert's brother and sister-in-law move, cleaning my oven, socializing with friends who no longer live in the area, giving said friends a ride to the airport, going to church, and baking a birthday strawberry-rhubarb pie for Robert) was to convert a pair of jeans that didn't fit me into a skirt. 

I bought the jeans earlier this spring on super-sale from L.L. Bean.  I knew there was a good chance I wouldn't like the way they fit, but I only paid $7 for them and the shipping was free, so I figured I didn't have anything to lose.  When they arrived, they fit in the waist, but the butt and legs were quite baggy.  I was going to give them to the thrift store, but then I decided I could make a skirt instead - I used to have one that I made from an old pair of jeans, and I liked it so much I wore it out. 

The first thing I learned was that L.L. Bean makes really good quality jeans.  The inseams and crotch seams both had several lines of stitching and were much more difficult to pick apart than I remember the seams being on the last pair of jeans I did this to.  When I started to re-sew the seams, I had major tension problems.  My machine really didn't like to sew with the heavy duty orange denim thread I bought to match the thread the  pants were sewn with at the factory.  I ended up having to buy a special 110/18 denim needle, and even so I had to crank up the tension higher than I've ever had it set to on this machine to avoid loops on the bottom of the fabric. 

When I cut the legs off, I measured and cut as little off as possible so that the remaining leg and the inserts from the cut-off legs would be roughly the same length after I sewed the front and back seams.  The jeans were "talls," so that resulted in an unhemmed skirt that was well past my knees.  Then I put it on and had Robert mark the tops of my knee-caps with chalk.  I measured the distance from the marks to the top of the waistband (23") and extended the line all the way around the skirt - I decided to make it 24" long in the back.  Then I cut about a half inch below the line, zig-zagged around the very edge, folded it under at the chalk line, pinned it, and sewed two seams to try to imitate the original hem that you see on pretty much every pair of jeans. 

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  It's definitely way better than the jeans I started with, and the whole thing only cost about $15, including the thread and the special sewing machine needles!

Traveling!

I have returned from my travels! I actually got back a week ago, but now I am over my jet lag and fully back in the swing of studying. I didn't do a ton of knitting while I was on vacation, but I did some in the car on our road trip around the western states, some on planes, and some while I was visiting with my grandparents in Denmark. I love to talk about handwork with my grandmother - she and her mother were both very accomplished needle-workers, and she has many beautiful tablecloths and bedlinens made in a wide variety of crochet, embroidery, and lace types. My grandmother always asks about my knitting and other handwork, and if I'm lucky, she also tells me about things she made when she was a girl and a young woman - for example, from a very young age, her father purchased from her the handknit socks she made for all of the members of her family. She told me about one pair of socks she made, from yarn she got by ripping out a skirt she had previously knitted for herself and dyed bright red. She said the first time the socks were worn (and I unfortunately don't remember who she said she made them for), the wearer's feet and ankles turned bright red from the dye!

Before I flew to Europe, Robert and I stopped for a day in Yellowstone on our way to visit various people in our families. We saw a lot of really amazing things, including buffalo!
Here we are standing in front of one of the hot springs. It's not entirely clear in the picture, but the water was a bright clear turquoise color, the steam rising off of it was green and blue and red, and the whole thing was surrounded by great colonies of bright orange thermophilic bacteria!
And, I did make it to the Vatican, where I wore my Vatican skirt! Here I am in a courtyard in the Vatican museums:
We/I had a lovely trip, and I acquired a special new project that I will post about soon. I also have several new and newish other UFOs to add in the coming days.

A Skirt to wear to the Vatican

Many weeks ago, not long after I finished the two brown skirts, I started thinking about making a peasant skirt. I looked at a few web tutorials and decided to do just a simple elastic waist, and I figured I wouldn't need a pattern. I went and shopped a sale at JoAnn for the fabric, elastic for the waist, and a pretty lace trim to go around the bottom edge.

Since I wasn't using a pattern, I went a head and did a back of the envelope calculation, as they say on the Frontiers of Science (David Helfand would be so proud). Here is my schematic drawing showing the way the tiers would expand:
Fast forward a goodly number of weeks to last Monday night, and I've gotten all of the pieces cut out, the waist casing done, and all but the bottom two seams sewn. When I tried the skirt on, it didn't fit right. I'd pictured kind of a drop waist sort of first tier beginning with the waistband, but that put the first seam right at the widest part of my hips. It fit, but it wasn't at all flattering. Luckily, it was also clear that the skirt was a lot longer than I'd pictured. Where I had expected the hem to fall just a tad below my knees, it was on track to be mid-calf length. So I chopped off about four inches from the top, and resewed the casing.

Another problem appeared when I went to sew the hem. I had only bought 2 yards of lace trim, when it turned out that I needed 2 1/2 yards. So I had to put the skirt on hold until I could get back to JoAnn to buy new lace.
When I make this skirt again, I'll make it a little bit shorter - probably by making each of the lower three tiers an inch or an inch and a half shorter. As Robert said, this skirt makes me look like I'm trying to be modest. That's exactly the image I want to project when I visit the Vatican when I go to Rome in a few weeks, but my general style is for skirts that are closer to knee-length.

First brown skirt

Here is the first brown skirt I made a few weeks ago. I bought the fabric and pattern during the JoAnn labor day sale last September, but I didn't get around to cutting out the pieces until January. A few weeks ago, my friend Evelyn kindly helped me put in the zipper (something I'd never done before). I really like the fabric, and I think it fits me well. I'm already thinking of adaptations of the pattern for future skirts - including a reproduction of my favorite skirt, which is unfortunately dying. My two favorite things about this pattern are the pockets and the pleats - both of which I had difficulty photographing well. The directions for putting together the pockets were somewhat confusing, but I'm really pleased with how they turned out.
You can kind of see the back pleats in this picture of the zipper. There are similar pleats in the front, too.

Second brown skirt

About two weeks ago I finished two brown skirts in one weekend. I'll post the first one as soon as I get someone to take a picture of me wearing it. This one, unlike the other one, was very quick to make up - it only took me an hour and a half, including cutting the pieces!

I followed this tutorial, and it worked pretty well. A few comments:

1. I'd never worked with knit fabric before. It doesn't feed through my machine in the same way as the woven fabrics I'm used to. This resulted in a certain sloppiness in some of my seams (including the hem). But in this skirt, I don't think it matters.
   
2. The fabric I chose is a 100% cotton jersey knit, and it's not quite as stretchy as it probably should be. The waistband relies on negative ease for fit, since there is no elastic involved, but my waistband is not stretchy enough to fit over my hips. I have to put it on over my shoulders. But this doesn't bother me.
3. I really like the yoga-style waistband. It's very comfortable and I think it looks pretty good.
4. I like that there were no pattern pieces to cut out. That's usually my least favorite part of a sewing project. Since these pieces were all rectangles, I just cut cut them out with my rotary cutter, quilting-style.
   

Overall, I'm happy with this skirt. I've been wanting a simple brown skirt like this for a while now, and I'm glad I finally got around to making it(and it only cost $7.50 for the fabric!)
I'd like to learn how to sew nice things with knits, but it's a little intimidating. I know a lot of people use a serger, but I'm certainly not going to buy a second sewing machine. I'm going to experiment more on my ordinary sewing machine.