Deceptively easy, deceptively hard

One of things that strikes me is that people who don't sew sometimes thing that relatively easy tasks are super complicated. At the same time exactly because they don't sew some things that seem easy on paper become a total headache when you actually have to do them.

So in the harder than it looks category is sewing this particular atara onto the tallit.

What has made it so hard is that there is a DIFFERENT atara on the other side of the tallit. And of course, the other atara is smaller and narrower. All of which means that I needed to sew the atara on so the stitching is invisible on both sides.

I won't take you through every bit of the process, but I will say that it took three frustrating attempts and several days to get right.

(Normally this is a job that would take maybe twenty minutes.)

Now for the other category, something that looks complicated, but is in fact a simple job. When I wear garments like this one

 people will inevitably comment, "There is no way you made THAT!" Well, not only did I make this skirt, it's a pretty easy job, something you could do with an elementary school kid if they so desired.

I have been lucky enough to be able to buy yards and yards of really nice lace like this lovely corded black lace with two scalloped borders for a couple of bucks a yard.

I only had one yard of this particular lace in my stash and after dealing with the frustrating atara attachment job I wanted something easy to do. I decided to make a skirt.

 This lace came with a bit of netting  and an ugly selvedge extending beyond the scallops. 

Just trim the extra stuff off. It will take several minutes. You can use either small embroidery scissors or  just regular old sewing shears. 

Then cut the yardage  or in this case, the yard in half.

This particular length of fabric wasn't cut exactly straight by the store that sold me the fabric. So after a bit of struggle I realized that if I aligned the scallops from the right and left side I could figure out where the center line was and cut at the midpoint without breaking my brain.

If I were a child with no hips, belly ,or butt, I would then sew up the side seams. But since I have all three and don't want to look like a dump truck in my skirt I narrowed the volume of the skirt and the hips and waist. That sounds complicated until you look at my sketch below.  The width of the waist is less than double my waist measurement, say 150% of my waist measurement. You can choose to make the waist either fuller or less full.

You can cut all four layers of skirt together --the front and the back of the skirt each folded in half or cut the front and the back separately.

I sewed together the side seams being sure to align the scallops at the bottom of the skirt and not worrying a whole lot about how even the waistband is-- because I trimmed the waistband after I sewed the side seams up.

I then needed to make the lining. This sounds like something hard. It isn't. It is a tube of fabric narrower than the outer skirt and just a bit shorter.

Cut the lining so the waistlines are the same  size. It makes life easier.

Then sew the two waistbands together, the skirt waistband and the lining waistband. 

Flip the lining to the inside of the skirt.

There are dozens of ways to insert an elastic. This is what I did here. I sewed a length of elastic to my waist size. I slipped the elastic circle between the lining and the lace right hear the waistband seam and sewed just below the elastic.

The method requires a whole bunch of shifting of your hands and the elastic around as you work. If you prefer you can make a casing-- that is stitch a row of straight stitching about 1/2  inch below the waistband seam and then cut a tiny hole so you can thread in a safety pin holding a long elastic tail.   Then thread the elastic through the casing  and then tie off the elastic.

Turn your skirt so the lining is on the inside. I found that the skirt looks better on me if I move the gathers to the back.

My total investment in terms of materials was about $2.50, $2.00 for the lace and about .50 for the lining and the elastic. My investment in time was about 30 minutes.

It took more time to write out the directions than to make it.