The tutorial looked simple enough and was pretty much perfect for a speedy feel-good project so after a quick trip to the shops I found myself armed with a lovely length of miscellaneous grey knit (suspected flannel stretch of some kind but the tag was missing) and some black elastic.
I figured the skirt would take me an hour or two seeing as I haven't really worked with knits before. This was factoring in the measuring, cutting and sewing. What I hadn't anticipated though was having to redo the stitching of the skirt. After gathering the skirt and pinning it to the elastic, I straight stitched the two parts together. All seemed well until I went to try the skirt on and I heard a big riiiip! Stretching the elastic had busted the seams!
When I thought about it later it did make sense as the seams weren't going to be stretching along with the elastic but as nothing was said in the tutorial I just went along with my standard stitch. Probably a silly newbie mistake on my part, so I made sure that when I was sewing the band to the skirt a second time around I used a straight stitch and then reinforced it with a zig-zag stitch, both of which were sewn on while I stretched out the elastic band.
Other than my newbie mistake though, I had a terrible time with this one. My machine decided to suddenly act like an item possessed. My needle broke, my bobbin jammed a bunch and my thread snapped 6 times. I was close to just calling it quits but there is a stubborn streak in me that kept persevering. No machine shall best me *shakes fist*.
Anyhoo after all of that, I worked out that the thread I was using was a cheap and nasty spool that had been lurking in my thread box for a long time. Annoying.
I didn't bother hemming the bottom of the skirt. I had made it a point when cutting to use the selvedge for the base of the skirt since it was such a simple *cough* skirt and I wanted to stay with that simplicity. Or I could just have been being lazy. Either way you can see the ends here look unfinished but I have had confirmation from workmates that it looks like it was styled that way on purpose, so I'm not doing any more work on it!
Moral of the story? Chuck out all of your cheap thread! It is EVIL.
Oh and if I do decide to make another one of these - the elastic band needs to be a lot wider. I thought it was fairly wide when I purchased it but now that the skirt is made up, I'd prefer it to be at least 2 times the width.
2 comments:
It's cute!!
*shakes fist!!!*
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