My Magical Skirt

So I see those fun swishy skirts at old navy and I wanted one. But for some reason though "I can do that better and for less money" So i managed to get a pattern M5812 from McCall. Then I decided to make it out of muslin and just dye it (That way I didn't have to buy different fabrics). One day I'm going to learn making it myself isn't going to be cheaper most of the time.. but sure is a lot more fun. So this pattern takes a full 7 yards of fabric so that $30 skirt from old navy is now about $15 for pattern and fabric. I managed to have about 5 yrds of muslin lying around and another yard of some other material. So instead of just going out and buying another yard or so of material I decide I should just buy a bolt of muslin.

Now after several days of cutting and sewing pattern pieces together I now have about 7 tiers of fabric. So now I get to dye it! I used a random mixture of rit powder dye which i'm sure I couldn't recreate if i wanted to at this point.

 I had to lie them out so they would dry a bit.










So I decide waiting for it to dry would take way way too long. So i threw all of them in the dryer for a bit which worked ok, except next time I would be a bit more careful with it unraveling and getting the pieces tangled up. Took me almost 30 min to untangle each piece.

So after this I had to sew each tier together. To do this I used my serger to gather each lower piece before attaching it to the upper piece. I changed all the settings, however every single time i manged to over gather and had to try to ungather it.


So after many hours I managed to get it all sewn together. Although half way through making the original pieces I decided I didn't like the closure at the top of the pattern so I decided to just make it a bit wider at the top (even more fabric) and and a place for a tie.
And after several (nonconsecutive) days of work I finally had my swishy skirt for about $20. It is definitely a great skirt it weighs 3lbs in total and i love the swish of it! But i think next time i'll just fork over the $30 and get one from old navy ;)