Refashioned Skirt

Months and months ago, when it was barely fall, I bought this skirt for ten cents. Sure, it was a color I hardly ever wear (if that unbleached muslin oatmeal-y color is actually considered a color) and it was a size 1x, and stained, but I thought I would dye it brown and have a nice ankle length skirt for the winter.

Then it sat in a box for a long time, and I changed my mind. First, brown seemed very boring. And then the length turned out to be a not very flattering one on me.

So today I dyed it red, and monkeyed around with length and width, and here it is:

You know, I dyed a jean jacket bright purple in junior high (I thought it was cool and wore it to shreds, but I only remember getting one compliment on it), and I remember the process being more involved and taking more time than this did. It must have been because of my age that it seemed so arduous.

While I was dyeing things, I made a little tie dye too, to use in my quilt:
It's only about 9 inches square. Since I like the way it turned out, I wish I'd done more, but it was a sort of a spur of the moment experiment.

Nichola skirt finished!

I actually finished the skirt Wednesday, but Brandon hasn't been home while it was light enough outside to take pictures until today.

I am very pleased with the way it turned out. I should get a lot of use out of this.

I expected the skirt version of Burdastyle's Nichola pattern to go faster than the pants, since I'd already done the fly once and was more familiar with the construction of skirts than pants.

I did not count on the fact that altering the pants pattern into a skirt pattern was a little more complex than I first imagined (I'll post more completely on that soon, for those who might want to do the same type of thing), and also that I added jeans-style front pockets, which I had never made before. I got the instructions out of Vogue Sewing, my trusty first resort in such matters.

Figuring out those details of this project took up a lot of my head time. Also, I had to figure out the best layout to maximize skirt length and flare, given my very limited yardage (One 60" yard). I used a contrasting striped cotton for the underside of the pocket flaps, front pockets, and waistline facing so that I would have more khaki yardage for the skirt. This is the same fabric used for the pocket flaps and waistline facing of the Nichola pants, only on the pants it was a purely aesthetic decision.

I omitted the buttons on the waist tabs of the skirt, because when I put all those big buttons on, it was too much bling for me. I love the buttons (they've got little sunburst shapes in the center), but on the pants I had two different sizes of the same grey vintage buttons with smaller ones on the tabs, and the overall effect wasn't as overwhelming.

The Idea and the Execution

I haven't done much fashion drawing since I was a kid, but now that I am trying to put more clothing in my Etsy store, I am dabbling at it again. This is the first one that I've actually made up. I drafted it to my measurements, from scratch. It is very simple, but its a start, anyway. You can see there are a couple of changes I made, no contrast waistband (I had second thoughts about the attractiveness of that), and the ruffle is shorter. I was using scraps of leftover from a previous project for the ruffle and pockets and such, and just didn't have enough for the wider ruffle.

The waist facings are polka dot too, just for fun.

If you are interested, I am selling this skirt in my shop. (And if you aren't my size, I do custom work!)