Saturday 26 September 2015

Rainbow sparkly jersey skirt!

A couple of months ago I went on a remnant bin raid at Rolls and Rems and picked up this:

 

It is RAINBOW SPARKLY JERSEY. I was so pleased with myself I bounced all the way home. This, I thought to myself, is what sewing is about. There's no rainbow sparkly jersey whatsoever in the shops right now, and if I wasn't learning how to sew I would be completely deprived of rainbows and sparkles. And even if the shops did have rainbow sparkly jersey clothes, they sure as hell weren't going to be £3.50. Here I was, sitting on this bus (no, DRIVING this bus from the top deck like a boss. Like a bus? Stop it, Jen), winning at life.

Then I got it home and realised I had absolutely no idea what I was going to do with a bit less than a metre of rainbow sparkly jersey. There wasn't enough of it to be a dress, it didn't hang in the right way to be a top, I knew I'd never wear a tiny technicolour jacket. So I draped the fabric around myself sadly a few times (newsflash: your blogger is an enormous dork), then put it at the bottom of my cupboard, possibly to be cried over another day.

Skip forward a little while. It was Tuesday night or Wednesday morning, depending on how your schedule works, and I was trying to get the Insomnia Fairy to leave me alone. She wasn't taking my hints - she was playing her favourite game, Mouse or Murderer? and was on a bit of a roll. I sat up and tried to read the nearest thing to hand, which was a sewing book because of course it was.

I'm not entirely sure what happened next. It was about four in the morning, I hadn't had much sleep recently, there seemed to be no prospect of my catching up on it any time soon. I can only assume that in my sleep-deprived and slightly delirious state, I'd thought, "I know! I'll make clothes! That is definitely a great thing to do when you're half asleep!" Then I must have read through the book's sewing tutorials (which I'm struggling to not call 'recipes'), seen a pencil skirt that called for just 0.8m of jersey, not considered the fact that I haven't worn a pencil skirt in years, and scrambled through my fabric stash for the sparkles.

I woke up at about lunchtime to find three garments cut out and pinned and another pattern laid out. Insomnia is weird.

Having cut out a pencil skirt from my rainbow sparkly jersey with little regard to its usefulness, I felt like I might as well carry on and sew it up.


(I am struggling with the photoshoot thing at the moment, but I still want to post, so have a crappy mirror-selfie phone photo)

This is the Easy Knit Pencil Skirt from Gertie Sews Vintage Casual. It is stupidly easy. Sew two side seams, sew a piece of elastic together at the ends, sew elastic to top of skirt, flip elastic inside skirt, stitch down at side seams, hem. It barely took me an hour, and that includes hand hemming time. One day I will get a machine which I don't have to MacGuyver the hell out of to make it twin needle-friendly, and on that day I will stop unnecessarily hand-hemming quick projects. 

I'm not much of a pencil skirt person, mostly because tummy cling is my least favourite thing ever, but I think this actually looks OK. Maybe I'll even wear it outside at some point. And if not, then I'll just sit around the house watching myself sparkle. 


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