Skirt!

Woot! This one very nearly almost killed me, but at least it was worth it. Friday, I think it was, I went looking for something new to sew on Pinterest. I wanted something scrappy, because I am a serial buyer of fat quarters and half-yards-- and you can't sew bupkis with fat quarters and half-yards-- but I still want some way of wearing all those gorgeous prints I have squirreled away, however small they might be. Y'know? So when I saw this pattern, I wasted no time. Little triangles! Little triangles in eighteen different prints! I pulled the linen out of my stash (I always buy linen in big 3-yard chunks, because I use it for so many things) and immediately a fat quarter of reproduction fabric leapt off the shelf and declared itself to be the project bandleader. It's that pale viney one, on the far right.

The only problem was, the project called for an elastic-waist skirt, which I knew would not fly. Not in nice linen, not in the wintertime, and not really in my closet. I wanted sleek and pencil-ish. But I confidently proceeded to my copy of SEW U to pull out the all-purpose, customizable skirt pattern I knew was in there... only to find it wasn't in there. Sigh. In the great hurricane of 2011 some of my sewing books and patterns had an incident with the standing water in Patrick's grandma's basement, which is where I'd been doing my sewing at that point. Obviously my SEW U skirt pattern was among the casualties. Sob.
BUT. But, I sucked it up and found a tutorial on making something called a "pencil skirt sloper," by which you can draft your own pattern. Another valuable sewing skill in my stable! I made a pattern, I added a seam allowance and cut it out, I even sewed a muslin, people! I am doing all of the things.
Approximately fourteen hours later... (sewing thirty-six damn triangles takes TIME, apparently)... I was rewarded.

AND, it fit. And now I have a custom skirt pattern to be manipulated, tweaked, lengthened, shortened, widened, narrowed... yeah, it was worth it, I think.
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