Birthday Skirt and other nonsense

What a week!  I completed an embroidered bag, got a final decision on the wedding headbands, sewed one and a half skirts and finally, FINALLY completed the weaving I had on the table loom.

This pattern is called "star and rose" and if I ever talk about doing it again, I want someone to hit me over the head with a shovel.  What a pain in the butt.  I'm so glad it's done I can't even began to explain what a relief it is.  If you look close in this picture you can see that I even have a very big mistake going across the pattern.  I need to decide what to do about that.  I could fold over the fabric and sew a hem past where the mistake is but that would mean that I would lose about 4 inches of length.  It is a table runner so length is desirable.  Another thing I could do is ignore it and try to sell it as is.  True story: I once had a piece with a similar mistake in it and I embroidered "nobody's perfect"  (or was it "everybody makes mistakes"?) right across the mistake and somebody bought it.   Sometimes we all need a reminder I guess.

It's my niece Bronte's birthday party on Sunday.  I decided weeks ago to make her a skirt and for weeks I thought about what type of skirt I wanted to make.  In my head I had a classic A line skirt with tiers of ruffles but the more I thought about it, the more I thought that maybe that style was a bit mature for an 8 year old.  Don't 8 year olds like skirts and dresses that twirl?   My second choice was a simple elastic waist skirt with just an ounce of tulle for fluffiness.  I love elastic waists because they are easy and casual but what I don't like is the bulk.  I remembered reading that for an elastic waist the measurement should be the hip measurement +5.  Armed with that bit of info,  I drew a small pattern for what I think is called a "dropped waist".  It looks like this:

________________ waist divided by 4 +1

f                                     

o                                distance between waist and hips

l

d

_____________________ hips dived by 4 +1

and then once sewn it looks like this:

Almost completely doing away with all that bulky fabric. 

Here is Greenleaf modeling her cousins skirt.  I love this fabric.  I found it at Hobby Lobby on clearance.  I also bought some other clearance fabric for a skirt for GL and it's mostly made up but not finished yet.  Maybe next week I can post that.

This little embellishment was the hardest part of the skirt.   Originally I had the grey fabric mimicking

the colored spirals in the skirt, sloping down the side and trailing  off the bottom.  I had it all pinned down and it looked really smashing but then I decided to SHUT. MY. BRAIN. OFF.  I tried to machine stitch it.  Sigh.  It was a huge mess and the worst part was that the stitching was so tight and complicated that if I tried to rip it,  I would have done damage to the fabric.  Instead I ended up hand sewing some more grey fabric over the original mess and then putting some purple tulle in the middle.  Not at all what I wanted or intended but it will have to do.  So what would have taken me 15 minutes to hand sew ended up taking me a half hour to fix.  BLAH!  What was it again? Nobody's perfect?  Yeah, that sounds about right.