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making lemonade

Or a nearly instant skirt.

Yesterday, my student brought me three lengths of fabric that she wasn't going to be using. One was a purple cotton jersey. The second was a heavy Victorian red cotton blend bottom weight knit. The third piece was an oddly shaped short and wide piece of bottom weight mauve-ey purple knit.

I supply my student with most of the fabric for her lessons and have often given her fabrics that she loved for working on her own. I was delighted that she was willing to share her stash with me.

After our lesson I played with the fabric trying to figure out if it was useable, because of it's odd proportions. It was too short to be a skirt on it's own. I realized that if I cut a pencil skirt and added a ruffle, I might be able to pull it off.

I measured the fabric around my hips and then cut it to size. Then, I folded the fabric in 1/4 and cut two hip curves. I sewed up those darts/hip curves on my serger. I then cut the remaining square of fabric into one big spiral, that was more or less six inches wide. If I had a marking tool handy, I might have even used a ruler.

I serged the ruffle to the bottom of the skirt and then sewed up the one side seam.. Forthe waisband I folded the waist in about 1/2 inch to the inside and then zigzagged a length of 2 inch wide elastic tothe inside of the waistband. to hold the elastic flat, I also stiched the elastic along the side hip curve seams and just where the elastic overlapped.

I edged the ruffle with a wide zig zag and stretched the fabric as I sewed. It makes for a cute ruffled edge. I like that the spiral ruffle is thrifty in terms of fabric usage . I used up every inch of the fabric (except for the hip curves).

I'm also happy that I finally managed to figure out how to take a photo in a mirror.


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