Another stupid endeavour

Having Actually Made a Thing, I have continued and I Made Another Thing. It was another skirt, though (I thought! Ha!) less tricky to make. There was no lining for a start, and far less fabric to handle, because it wasn't a crazy puff-ball shape. But then it turned out that I had only managed to insert the zip in the first skirt by some strange fluke, and I managed to get this one wrong three times and have to unpick it, before I realised what I was getting wrong. So that was fun.

Skirt Number Two was also a much lighter-weight fabric, so harder to keep the edges neat, and harder to avoid it stretching while being sewn. And there were more seams sewn on the bias, which didn't want to behave. And it was a full-circle skirt. And the only way to get a really neat hem was to hand-stitch a blind hem. Despite only being knee-length, a circle turns out to have quite a large perimeter. About 15 feet of hand-stitching. 

A very, very long hem

So once I'd recovered from the cramp in my hands, the weather turned cold, and I've only actually managed to wear my nice swishy circle-skirt once. 

Swishy!

But once summer comes, and it's not too windy, I shall be swishing and swirling my way round the village.

Meanwhile, however, I have been unable to resist the lure of more beautiful fabric and am embarking on a pair of trousers. Which would be a splendid idea, if it weren't for the fact that the only pattern that I could find that even came close to making what I wanted was a download, and not a physical printed pattern. So step one was to print out thirty A4 sheets of paper and attempt to sellotape them all together into one giant sheet. It turns out it's quite tricky to stick that many pieces together perfectly lined up. Two days later and I had an approximation to a pattern. Not a useable pattern you understand, since it couldn't be cut out and pinned to fabric, being made of thirty pieces of erratically-sellotaped printer paper. So then I had to trace the pieces onto pattern paper, and cut those out. 

You might think that I would now be ready to cut the fabric for my trousers. But, no! I have opted to make a muslin version first, to get the fit right before committing to cutting the actual fabric. Which sounds like a really splendid idea, until it turns out that muslin has a mind of its own, and shifts, stretches and wriggles as soon as you consider cutting or sewing it. So, I currently have a half-assembled pair of muslin trousers, and a vague reluctance to carry on, because I fear the step where I discover they don't fit quite right and I have to work out what changes I need to make.

It may be some time before this is a blog post about trouser progress...