Forays into Fashion - Making a Skirt

Besides not being able to pay for basic necessities and general entertainment, lack of a job also means that shopping sprees are completely out of the question. So, I already know that I'll be getting in knee-deep with the sewing machine to spruce up the old and create the new! However, as mentioned in my last entry, I have literally ZERO experience with a sewing machine. Well, HAD, I should say. I've dug through the manual and gotten a couple tips from my mom on the basics over the past couple of weeks, and figured I had enough practice sewing on an old t-shirt to make one of these relatively simple-seeming ADORABLE elastic-waisted skirts a la Dress911:

I went down to the fabric store and hit up the discount section, grabbing 2 meters of this sweet black-with-pink-roses fabric for 5 bucks, plus a meter of thick black elastic and some black thread. Firstly, it will not take you 2 meters to make this skirt. But it's nice to have a long piece of fabric so you can use just one strip, rather than having to cut out two sides, thus increasing your seams to two and doubling your chances for error. Also, if your first attempt ends up in the trash bin, you will have more than enough fabric to try again, or use it for something else.
As for fabric types, I think pretty much anything will work (by hook or by crook), but ideally I would recommend something with horizontal stretch, that doesn't need lining. The fabric I ended up with is almost corduroyish, does not stretch, and was probably intended for curtains, but it's nice and thick without being disgustingly heavy and it eventually worked!

Additionally, for any item of clothing that you intend to wear multiple times, it might be a good idea to wash your fabric before sewing, just to make sure it doesn't bleed or shrink or dissolve or some other unthinkable travesty. Worse, it might be a type of fabric that needs ironing. Who needs that kind of trouble?

So anyways, I started out by laying my fabric on the floor, and cut a straight line lengthwise down the middle. Since mine had that corduroyish feel, it was easy enough to keep it straight, but get a piece of chalk or something and mark down a line if you need one. You don't need to be super precise but a big squiggly line that starts in the middle and ends up an inch away from the far left corner is just wasted fabric.

So I've got my long piece of fabric. Then I started to do things in a completely illogical order. This is how it went.

I took my piece of elastic and placed it around my natural waistline (where your waist is the smallest) ...always a good spot to accentuate! If you want the skirt to sit higher or lower, make the appropriate adjustments. I was happy with it at the waist so I snipped the elastic to almost the exact circumference of my waistline. With the amount of length lost from sewing the two ends together, I thought it would be comfortable but secure in that position. And it might have been, but this was a learning experience.

So, I knew I didn't want the skirt fabric to be flat against the elastic. I wanted it to have a little "pouf" at the waist, so naturally, I pleated it (?!) and pinned it irregularly onto the elastic, thinking to myself that this would somehow let my non-stretchy fabric have a little "give". I pleated it all the way along the elastic and cut off the excess, and immediately straight-sewed the fabric down.

Above: What you should do. Maybe. Below: What I did.

Any chance of my skirt having stretch was destroyed then and there. The fabric poufed out just the way I wanted it to, but there was no elasticity at the seam, thus no way that I could simply sew up the ends and slip the thing on when I was finished. With the particular fabric I used, I don't know if it would have helped, but I am almost certain that with a stretchy fabric, your piece will still have some elasticity if you use a ZIGZAG stitch. To zig the zag:

Turn dial A anywhere higher than zero for a ziggier zag. I like 3 or 4. Depending on how close and you want your stitches, adjust dial B. 5 is the widest interval, 1 the most narrow. Again, I like 3. It seems like a good compromise. But do some test stitching on spare fabric to see which will work best for you. If your sewing machine looks completely different from this, consult a manual or find yourself another website.

So I wanted to salvage my nicely-poufy-but-not-stretchy pile of muck. Since the elastic just about reached all the way around where I wanted it to go anyways, I decided I could put a small zipper there, thus completing the length and enabling me to actually get it on and off. I bought an inexpensive black one, about 4 or 5 inches long. I decided I liked the way it looked just sitting on top of the fabric, so I just slapped it on to the end (conveniently giving me a nice clean edge) and then tucked the end bits under what would be the back seam. After pinning everything in place, I sewed it on and then turned it inside out to do the seam.

So neat!

I didn't really know what I was doing but it turned out ok. Just pin it, make sure your fabric is flat, and try to keep it as straight as possible. As you can see, I discovered the zigzag here.

With that out of the way, I then realized that I should probably cut the skirt to the actual length I wanted it to be. Ideally, I would have done this first. But then, why would I have this blog? So I measured from my waistline to about where I wanted the bottom to be, and laid my skirt out so that the bottom fabric was flat against the table. I pinned the fabric at that length in the front and back center, and then folded the excess fabric under, flattening it and pinning it all around.

Then came the hemming. Once again, clueless. There was an excessive amount of fabric tucked underneath at that point so I hacked a bunch of it off above the pins. Then I just used the lines beside the needle on my sewing machine to make an even stitch all the way around. After I took out the pins, I cut off a little more excess fabric with a little more care. It worked fine, but it would have looked neater (at least with this particular fabric) to have folded the raw edge under the sewing line and pinned it down like that. But this whole project is a complete atrocity if viewed from the inside anyways, so let's just keep it external.

Hooray for fraying!

So, the method didn't really work out like I expected, but the skirt more or less turned out the way I wanted, so I'm gonna call this a success. I've worn it twice and it's survived the wash, so I'd say it's worth the 7 dollars and the fun I had making it!

Cheers!