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.
