I sewed something!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Yup.  I sewed something today.  Admittedly a very simple something, but a something nevertheless.

Took mum for an outing to Abhakhan fabrics today since she needed craft cotton for her charity quilts.  They had a lot of neoprene and scuba which I've been keen to sew with for a while so I got a remnant of black with a sort of houndstooth effect finish.  Reasonably heavy though not the heaviest in the shop.

The original plan was to make a gored skirt but being short on time and keen to get more than one skirt out of my remnant, I picked a circle skirt instead.  I only cut it at 22 inches long so it took less fabric than you might imagine for a circle skirt. I don't have all that much fabric left but I think a bit of careful cutting should yield a straight skirt.

Three hours work, and the skirt was done and ready to wear to work on Monday.  The zipper is a centred application.  I used my usual centred method.  Tack the seam, lay the zipper face down on the seam allowance, pin (or in this case stick it with Steam A Seam), sew from the front, take out tacking, and Bob's Your Uncle, it's done.  I used the overlocker to construct most of the skirt, just using the machine for the seam where the zipper was inserted.

The waist treatment was just a bit of strong ribbon cut to the size of my waist with some turn under at each end to keep it neat. My waistline had stretched out a bit as the fabric was heavy so I tacked the waist in quarters so I could pull it up to fit the band, then pinned and sewed it.  I turned the ribbon down inside the skirt, pressed it and then sewed, on the machine, a quarter inch from the edge of the waist, with a standard length stitch.

I had a bit of a debate about the skirt length and ended up going shorter than originally planned.  The hem is machine stitched because the skirts I'd seen in the stores had that sort of hem (also, the hem was about fourteen miles around and would have taken forever to hem by hand).

Overall I found the fabric easy to manage, simple and straightforward to sew, but a little tricky to press.    I would certainly sew with it again.

I've also bought some knit fabric to make nightwear and have a nightdress cut out.  The second piece of knit turned out to be too small to make a nightdress so will become a summer top.  I also bought some navy poly wool knit which will be made into a dress for work.

There is a plan to visit a new to us fabric shop near Dewsbury in the next few weeks so there may be another fabric acquisition post at that point.

The "maybe blanket" definitely won't be.  The fibre is currently being spun though and I hope to have something to show in the next few weeks.