Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Gathered Skirt

Today I thought I would do something a little different and finally move on from wedding related projects. I only have a couple more to talk about, and frankly, they can both wait. Instead, I thought I would talk about a skirt I finished recently.


I had some leftover poly-rayon "linen like" fabric from Jo-Ann's. It is nowhere near as nice as real linen, but it's also half the cost and doesn't have to be shipped to me. The color is much closer to Robin's egg in real life. I wanted to play with my ruffler foot and thought this rectangle would be perfect.

So first I cut out a waistband, then I cut the remaining fabric in half and sewed the two rectangles together using a french seam. Because of that, the skirt is a tad shorter than I would normally wear, but I wasn't sure how much fabric I would need and I didn't want to run out.

Next, I ran my length of fabric through my gathering foot. I set it to pleat the fabric every 6 stitches. I think I would have preferred more gather, but again, I wasn't sure how much fabric the gathers would actually eat up. 


After I gathered all the fabric I attached the waistband. I did so by lining up the center of the waistband with the french seam on the skirt, that way I could attach the zipper to the other side and have both seams be centered. (The waistband started off three inches wide, I folded up half and inch on either side and interfaced the whole thing)


After I sewed the waistband to the right side of the fabric I cut off the remaining fabric at both ends and attached the zipper. I used a clean seam to finish the seam on the zipper side. 


The skirt is cute enough and I had fun playing with the ruffler foot. The whole thing was a bit fast and dirty, for example, I machine finished the hem, although I still hand tacked the waistband to the wrong side to keep my stitches from showing on the right side.I also didn't measure a darn thing, which is why I'm not calling this a tutorial. But hey, the skirt only took about two hours to finish, I will wear it (actually I'm wearing it right now which is why I thought to write up a blog post about it) and now I want to play with the ruffler foot some more. If you have never used one, look them up on youtube. They are crazy looking feet.

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