A Twirley Skirt Trip Report! Don't read if you're squeamish...
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Evidently, yall wear your best smarty pants when sewing. A factoid no one enlightened me on.
After procuring ½ - 1 yard of Walmarshays finest Halloween-esque fabric, in various tones of purples, blacks and oranges with a little lime for good measure (Im not a muggle after all) in prints, dots, plaids, solids with coordinating ric-rac (which until a month ago I called brick-brack, shhhh!) thread, punkin buttons, tulle, etc. I was all set to tackle a algabraic equasion of the twirly-skirt.
How hard can it be? I AM smarter than a 5th grader after all!
First of all I have to measure Norahs (dd2) wee- little waist (again). Comemere baby girl, mama needs to measure your tummy (again) and she sighed and accomodated me (again). 21 inches roughly the measurement of my right thigh (on a good day- 20 years ago). Ok, we have a given to the algebra. Finally using algebra *cough30* years later!
Waist = 21 inches, or A . A will also equal the yoke or casing layer. A mini first tier. Not in the original plan but Im remembering someone posting that the elastic waist band takes a lot of fabric weight and may droop funky.
A2= B second tier
42 inches long. Good grief, shes 2! Wont that be huge on her? Will it sit better on her waist with my taking liberties with the math?
B2= C third tier 84 inches! Breathe.
I went to cut and suddenly remembered I had not washed and dried all the new fabric first. I KNOW that cant be good, so I wash it all in warm and dry. And iron. With my new Sunbeam.
NOW, I cut. When I get to C, I dont have enough pumpkin fabric due to my OCD about matching the pattern repeat on the strips. So I have to drag all my kids to the
Walmart fabric department. Not an easy task. But Im determined.
That ½ yard also needs to be laundered and dried. So I load up the washing machine with a like colored load.
2 ½ hours later, I iron and cut the final strip and add it to the endlessly long tier C. I think it could have reached the moon and back...
First I sewed the elastic casing. All went well until I also sewed the elastic door closed. This should have been my omen of not good things to come.
I seam-rip open the door and start the zig zag stitch to begin the gathering of B. I have no ruffler foot. So I do a small zig zag and grab a needle and double layer of thread to go under the zigs and zags. My thread didnt break (yet) so I pinned it to the bottom of A. After 5 or 20 pins, I realize I didnt have RIGHT sides together. And re do. Rookie mistake. Then struggle a little with equi-distant gathers, but do my best and go ahead and sew B to A.
Now Im looking into the eye of the beast. 84 inches of grinning pumpkins waiting to also be ruffled. I know, I can read the DIS whilst I hand gather the final tier. All is going well until I realize the initial anchoring stitch I did came undone and I was going under the zigzags with no anchor. GRRRRR! I betcha I went all the way around twice. Maybe more. Double Grrr!
I re-anchor very firmly and start over. Time to pin C onto B.
BUT! But The gathered part of C refuses to match up with the straight edge of B. I pin and repin and RE- repin till its right. Im relieved its finally time to sew. Im relieved to tell you: Right sides were together this time. I seriously would have imitated Donald Duck and needed court required anger management classes
.
I put the machine on speed Racer and am thrilled at the progress. When my final stitch was stitched, I raised the needle and raised the foot and discovered I was out of bobbin thread about 3 miles ago. Uh Huh!
I need a time out!
Or a drinkie so I pour myself a tall one (diet Pepsi) and load my bobbin as full as possible with orange.
And re-PIN, since I had pulled out the pins as I sewd. And re-spaced the ruffles just so and sewed it allllll over again. This time on slow down, curves ahead speed. This last section took most of the day.
The hem went off without a hitch. All 5 miles of it. I grabbed my pinking shears and cleaned up the tons of bulky seams and nicked a part of the skirt! UGGGH! Maybe Ill cover the nick with orange ric-rac?
I insert the elastic and sew it into it's new home.
Then I took a good hard look at the Twirly Skirt from heck and tried it onto my dd who twirled and achieved a FULL blown horizontal twirl. Her first! She twirled and twirled till she was dizzy.
She said she loves it so much.
It will go with her new yet to be decorated Childrens Place orange T shirt and matching hair bows and black leggings.
Heh heh, too exhausted to post it tonight. I kinda like it! And using my fuzzy disney math, I saved a bundle not buying on Voldemort !!! More money to hand to the Mouse in September!
Yes, I just Trip Reported my skirt!!!