Well, I promised the Sari Maxi skirts and here they are.
Having been inspired by THIS PIN, which led me to THIS blog post, and owning 8m of beautiful Sari fabric that I never got around to using, naturally I thought this might be an excellent use for it - it is the perfect length after all and the colour and embroidery on it were amazing...
So, already having the fabric, I needed elastic. I found 5m of 3" wide white elastic on Ebay for £3 or £4 which was brilliant. It arrived super-fast and I started to get excited. A quick trip to my local Dunelm Mill for the thread and fabric dye to dye the elastic and I was sorted.
Now I already knew that the elastic wouldn't take to the dye 100%, but this wasn't just any old dye, this was Dylon Flamingo Pink and Dylon Bahama Blue! I decided to make the pink skirt first as this was the longest length of fabric and I wasn't sure whether I had enough blue to make a skirt with decent pleats. Thinking it was a waste to use the dye on just a length of elastic, I tossed in a sorry-looking Cotton summer top that was looking a bit old and yellow.
Well... The instructions say to stir more-or-less constantly for 45 minutes. Almost immediately the Cotton top turned the most amazing pink and I was thrilled (until I discovered they'd used polyester cotton to stitch it, so I had a bright pink top with visibly white stitching), the elastic? Not so much. In fact, not at all. 'Have faith' I told myself... 'Give it the full 45 minutes and see what happens'. As it turns out, not much at all. So, lesson learned, cheapo elastic is GREAT (it's lovely elastic really) but it doesn't dye. Never mind. No-one is going to see the waistband anyway as I always prefer to wear my t-shirts and tanks over the top.
Having failed to dye the elastic, I followed the instructions to turn it into my waistband. As it turns out, I'm as crap at measuring myself as I am at dying elastic, and the first one (shown below) was several inches too big. So I had to unpick it and lop a bit off. But it went well either way.
Once that was done, I set to work hemming and stitching my tube of fabric. All was going well apart from the horrendous fraying - I really should have known better. But some fray block will sort that out when I get around to it.
The fabric has a beautiful gold thread panel at the bottom, but to tidy up the bottom I hemmed the selvedge edge along a natural line in the design. I was very proud of myself for that actually ;-).
So, tube sewn, waistband sorted, I set to pinning the fabric to the waistband. The technique is simple to implement but complicated to explain, but long story short basically you pin the waistband to the skirt, then pin the opposite side to the exact opposite side of the fabric, and keep 'halving' each time as you pin until the fabric is evenly pinned to the band. It will be very flappy and the point is that when running it through the machine, you keep the waistband stretched until the fabric is smooth, then when you release the fabric, voila, natural pleats.
 |
| Pin the fabric evenly |
 |
| When the taut elastic is released, the fabric pleats naturally. |
This might have worked fine except in the original pin there is no waistband:fabric width ratio guide, and my fabric was very very wide compared to the waistband, so the tension I had to keep the elastic under as I fed it through my sorry old sewing machine was quite phenomenal. As a result I broke 4 machine needles sewing both these skirts. My machine has the potential to be used properly, but I lack the experience and skill, and most importantly, the 'gizmos'. As a result, all my sewing projects are done with a standard or button hole presser foot and a normal needle. I just about manage to use different stitches...
Eventually, after MUCH profanity, snapped threads, snapped needles and jammed bobbins, I finally had 2 usable skirts:
As it turned out, the smaller piece of bright blue fabric made a much better skirt and I hemmed it more rigorously so it frays much less.
Either way, I'm really proud of how these turned out and I would thoroughly recommend giving it a try. :-D
Lex.
No comments:
Post a Comment