Craft Rage

Howdy!

Well, Smooshy's surgery went well, and outside of being treated like a leper by our other cats for two days, she's just fine. Still on the outskirts of the cat family, but fine.

Yesterday at around 3:30, I decided to take a sewing break. My mind was mush, and I needed something that wouldn't require a great deal of thought. I put on my MP3 player, loaded a book to listen to, and by 7:00, I'd made this;

I have a bin full of short-cuts & remnants of 1 metre to 1.5 metres in length. This was a 1 metre cut of 60" fabric - it's brushed rayon or something, it's got a lot of body, but it's very soft to the touch, and fairly drapey.

I ripped up 6, 6" strips, and used three for the bottom ruffle, two for the middle ruffle, and one for the waistband (not shown). I used my ruffler foot to make the gathers in the bottom ruffle and middle ruffle, then sewed the two levels together. The top of the skirt is essentially the rest of the fabric, sewn in a tube up the back, with an invisible zipper at the top. I fit the waist by pinching the excess and marking it with chalk, then darting and cutting as necessary.

I'm really pleased with the results - this is definitely a skirt I'll wear in public. It's far from perfect - the centre seam on the middle ruffle is REALLY obvious, though I don't really care - that's easy enough to fix.

It would have gone much faster if I hadn't spent so much time fiddling around with my ruffler foot - that thing is just so darned much fun! I made ruffles out of every scrap of fabric laying around, just to figure out the length and depth of the ruffles for this skirt. I think this might be a 1.5 hour skirt, start to finish, and less if I just put in an elastic waistband, which I might do the next time around.

Note to self; wear more skirts.

And finally;

We put the towel down so that Smooshy would have someplace cozy to sleep - for whatever reason, she loves terry cloth. Unfortunately, Boobah (the black cat) and Bonzo (the fluffy one) also like terry cloth. And each other. Like I said, Smooshy's still on the outskirts of the cat family.

Labels: projects, smooshy