One of the lovely things that took place this year is that my delightful cousin moved a couple of blocks away. She is in the process of moving, luckily for me a couple of blocks in the other direction fromour apartment.
Moving requires one to winnow down your STUFF to a more manageable amount. My cousin no longer needed the offcuts of fabrics from the dress that she had worn for her brother's wedding. She dropped it off at my apartment.
Not only did my cousin give me this wonderful embellished chiffon, the matching underlayers, two different organzas and a netting were included as well.
My great niece has a birthday in early January. She is the sort of girl who loves all things sparkly. Like my own daughter at the same age, dress up is an important part of her life. I thought that I could turn the offcuts into a skirt for my great niece.
I actually looked through my many sewing books to see if I had an appropriate pattern . I did not. I did find an excellent measurement chart to help me with the length.
I used another chart for the waist sizing. I had less of the sparkly fabric than I did of the lining. I ended up hand gathering the lining to the sparkly fabric.
I made a waistband out of soft knit mesh in colors that coordinated with the blue in the twinkly fabric. i even made a two channel waist band---actually a first time for me.
I hemmed the skirt with scallops cut from lace yardage. The lace has gold highlights. The wide lace hem ( I even hemmed the underlayer)) made the skirt too long. I stitched pickups on both the sequined fabric and the lining to being up the length of the skirt.
Yesterday I packed up the skirt and mailed it to Brooklyn.
Today I send a photo of the skirt to my cousin who had given me the fabric. She mused about how much she would have loved the skirt as a little girl. I was filled with memories of the hard play my own daughter used to do in the dress up box when she was little. I was filled with regret, as I always am that clothing construction was still beyond my skills when my daughter was at the height of her dress-up years. Our dress up box in those years was filled with lengths of twinkly fabric, my mother-in-law's black lace bathrobe, a couple of pairs of wings, some flashy bat mitzvah dresses that I had purchased at a Upper East Side children's clothing consignment store, a few wigs and pairs of long gloves.
As the next generation of kids in our family grows up I assume that their dress up boxes will also be filled with over the top clothes that I make. There is something so satisfying about enriching the fantasy life of a child.
This is so much fun! Adore the skirt, and would like one too (LOL). Cathie, Montreal area!
ReplyDeleteThe skirt was technically a little harder than anticipated--well some bits of it were harder than anticipated---matching up the smaller width of the sequined fabric to the much larger lining took some thought. I'm really happy that I finally figured out how to do elastic in multiple channels---but less difficult than anticipated.
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