Baby steps - in a skirt!!

I made a skirt!  

I was so excited and then once I finished it and tried it on I sort of deflated a little bit.  There may have been a teeny-tiny gap between my initial creative impulse, surge of accomplishment and then the donning of the final product.  

It’s a nice basic skirt.  McCalls M6654. (Pics below.)  Knee-length straight skirt, elastic waistband, no frills whatsoever.  I went off-road a little and top-stitched the side seams and the waistband, just for fun.  Even made it look mostly okay although there are some wobbles that won’t bear close inspection.

I bought the fabric and pattern together as a project kit on Craftsy and was excited about the color of the fabric - it reminded me of the deep blue-green of the waters off the south coast of Australia.  Or of blue spruce.  But once I got the skirt made up it sort of said more about a late-model Ford Taurus than a natural wonder.  It’s a tiny bit bigger than it needs to be - I’m still trying to figure out the whole sewing and then serging (or is it the other way around?) process and I ended up using ⅜” seam allowances on the sides rather than the full ⅝”.  Not a huge difference but enough that I notice it when I’m wearing the skirt.

But aside from these little things my eagle eyes cannot help but note, it’s still a pretty color and I’m thrilled to have made an actual honest-to-Pete skirt.  I’m really so excited to have finished a garment I will willingly and unselfconsciously wear in public - I wore it to work the day after I finished it!  Now that I have made one tiny step in the direction of success (and away from that last disastrous project), I am excited to try something else.  

My 2yo agreed to help me model the skirt.  He just likes getting his Rangers gear in photos.

This was my first, solo, wildly awkward attempt to document the skirt.  Nothing screams “success!” like upside down selfies of your own knees and toes.

If I make this pattern again I think I will try to add short little side slits at the hem, about three inches on each side. I had a knit skirt like that back in the nineties and loved it with all my heart. Really, the love I had for that skirt was a bit over the top.

(The same night I finished the skirt I also made a batch of blondies from an Alice Medrich recipe I hadn't tried before. Delicious. Although next time - definitely more bourbon.)

My imaginary friend

It is kind of a funny little trick of current circumstances that most of the time I spend sewing is actually time in my head spent imagining my next steps, plotting projects, or researching things online.  Being able to sneak in an hour or two of actual sewing time of an evening is totally unpredictable so in the meantime, sewing is more like my imaginary friend.

Meet my imaginary friend, Sewing!  She is AWESOME.  She’s full of super interesting stories and adventures, knows a lot of cool people, is constantly surprising me, and can make time zip by in a flash.  She has a wicked sense of style that’s never the same from one day to the next, and her presence on social media is wildly entertaining.  Also, she always sees the best in me – in my imagination, the things I sew are flawless and comfortable and exactly what I had in mind every time!

My one tiny little complaint is that Sewing never seems to get tired.  There I am, dragging my tired self off to bed at the end of a long hustle and bustle, and there she is, tweaking my mind with more questions:  how *do* you sew with stripes?  What is a good lining for silk voile?  Is that new fabric place in Deep Ellum online yet?  When are they open?

It can be very hard to go to sleep at a reasonable bedtime, an hour that will allow me to sleep enough to pop awake at 5.30 a.m. tomorrow like I need to, when Sewing is pushing me to look things up online and twist certain things in my head to see what they’ll do.

In that regard she has a lot in common with my other good friends Books, Instagram and Melissa.