Yay, I made a skirt! Haha, imagine if I returned to the sewing blog world and didn't make anything? Let's hope I can keep it going, right!
Last year, I took myself on a little tour of the fabric market in Dongmen Lu (Lu is 'road' in Mandarin/Chinese and was the first thing I learnt living here) because I mainly wanted to sew cotton cushion covers (I had a project in mind using some vintage tea towels I'd brought over) but didn't have any cotton. So I was having a stickybeak around and found this hefty knit that I think is called 'neoprene', but now I'm looking at that (at the Mood Fabric's link) it looks too hefty... this is lighter, and obviously with the print explosions of space. Please let me know if you know the fabric, one thing shopping in the markets here, I don't know the names of anything, plus they have Chinese names. So, tricky!
But, it was cheap, and I got a metre for maybe 60RMB, which might have been 10 dollars Australian at the time, as it was really wide. I made a pattern from newspaper, thinking it'd be a tight-isn dress with floppy arms/sleeves built in, and then ... I cut it too short:
As you see above wearing my yoga pants underneath ^^^ EEP. I thought about adding a band, but then I actually didn't like how it felt around the arms, and the neckline felt weird. The fabric sews well, but it doesn't sit well unless it's totally stretched out. So I put it away for a while to think and last week thought I'd make a pencil skirt from it, and it worked out fine.
So it's a refashion or a Handmade Save, instead of an unfinished object. Being without a stash and with no 'To Do' pile of mending or anything, I've decided to use up all the fabric and finish all the sewing projects. We'll see how long that lasts!
So this time I used an existing pencil stretchy skirt from H&M that fits really well to shape it properly, and did thick elastic in the waistband, folded, basted to the skirt then overlocked together. I tried it on and I was like, wow, fits well, took 2 podcast episodes of 'Reply All' (they're short!) and then overlocked the hem because I just don't think this fabric would hem well, it'd just be like a bubble hem or something.
And so my 'fancy' outing wearing my Pinky Space Explosion Skirt was with this guy:
Two Year Old Felix! He's not really a Baby Darling anymore!
To this 'fancy' place:
fabric dress great...
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