That’s right, it’s time to Talk About…another skirt. Who’s shocked? Is this one any more normal? Probably not. Who does normal anyway?

Not this Geek Gurl!

This skirt all started a couple of weeks ago when I took Joram to the local quilt store to pay for his sewing camp. While there, he found this awesome fabric:

This fabric screamed two things to me immediately. The first one was, “Oooh Steampunk!”

The second came in the voice of The Doctor:

…it’s more like a big bowl of wibbly wobbly timey wimey… stuff.

Well put, Doctor. I like it!

So I snatched up two yards of this stuff and ran. Sadly, my plate was full with this massive dance festival so I knew the lovely clock fabric would just need to wait. Unless I could make time spiral for me to add a few hours into the day.

Too bad I couldn’t do that.

After recovering from the dance festival, I pulled this cut of fabric out and looked at it. I then spent an entire day on pinterest looking at skirts. No judging, you know you do it, too! None seemed quite right. Finally at stupid-o-clock I decided to just use the same pattern I made my math skirt out of, for another half circle skirt.

I whipped this skirt up in 90 minutes. Not bad.

First, I laid out my fabric and just like before, there was no way I could do a full circle skirt with my limited yardage. I debated a redux of the first skull skirt, like I contemplated with the math skirt, but my pattern was in sorry shape.

I did notice though, with the half circle pattern, I could cut on the fold. That took out an entire seam! Huzzah! Note: This is your standard 45 inch fabric. Unlike the math skirt, it wasn’t a tad narrow or with directional issues.

I also had this awesome eyelet lace from Balticon, and a metric ton of it. Ok, so maybe it’s really like 20 yards. More than enough to add to the hem of a skirt!

I wanted to add this to the hem, so I began here. After using the serger on my hem and sides first, of course. This eyelet already had a nice casing and I didn’t think it would flip too well, so I chose to top stitch this to the hem of the skirt. Translation: I laid this right side up on the right side of the skirt and fed it through my machine as such.

I carefully pinned as I went along as the hem of the skirt is circular. Curves are hard, which is why I like the bias tape. It can handle that well.

When I was one, I then penned the skirt with right sides together and went up the side seam, adding in the zipper. Easy peasy.  I followed that up with a bias tape waist and I was done.

The only reason it took me 90 minutes was a little issue with my serger thread continually snapping and the care I took with the lace.  Without those details, you could whip this bad boy out in under an hour.

How did it turn out? Perfect! It even matched the blouse from Balticon’s masquerade that I really hoped the skirt would match! WIN!

So what did I do? I got up five hours after finishing the skirt and wore it to Church. What do you think?

Win of the day: Someone actually thought this was ready to wear/off the rack.

Sorry I have a dumb face. The kiddo snapped while I was giving instructions. I so can’t wait for the next Steampunk Ball.

 

–Lady O