The skirt advances!

I went into walmart to get some sort of elastic for the waistband of the skirt. I figure that way it would lie down under the corset and I wouldn't have to worry about any unexpected sizing changes in my waist area. So I'm looking around and I see elastic 'thread'

I figure this will be worth a shot since it was only $1.47 for the entire spool and it had decent directions on the back.

The first thing I did to the skirt was serge the upper waistline. I did this with the intention of just finishing the edge so I could cleanly fold it over to make a waistband. (Which i'm leaning away from now but still may do) The brighter white color is the thread from serging. Thankfully it all turns out looking about the same color since I plan on dying it later.

I decided to sew rows of the elastic thread in three different spots, one opposite the opening and two ad the midpoints between the opening and the other side.  I figure this will make it not seem quite as gathered. 

So to start this little adventure I first had to prep the stretchy thread. The instructions basically said to hand wind it on a bobbin tightly for really light wait fabrics and moderate for other fabrics.



After this was done I just had to place the bobbin in the sewing machine, normal thread through the needle and I had to set my stitch length to about 4.0. 

Of course I did a few test runs before trying it with my skirt!

And look at that isn't it neat!
(I used brown thread on white fabrics so I could see exactly what happened to the normal thread but normally it would match.)

So now it's time to sew the skirt. I first attempted 3 rows and realized I needed it to gather quite a bit more so I put in 5 rows in each of the 3 spots. (It's elastic it can always stretch) I realized that if I put the rows closer together then they gather even more so I'll try to remember this for next time!

 

And thus the waist is gathered! The next step is attaching fasteners to the opening so I can close the skirt... I'm thinking of either putting in a few snaps ( I have some lying around since I was planing on using them in another project) or possibly some tiny eye hooks. I'm leaning towards the snaps since the hooks may dig into me if they end up under the corset. Or I may think of an entire different way to close it between now and when I actually close it. After that my next step is to hem it and possibly do so with some sort of trim on the inside at the bottom. The skirt doesn't have any adornments on the bottom for the costume however to make it flow properly I'd like to add some weight somehow. Usually just the extra fabric sewed into the hem works but I'm not sure how much extra there will be and if it will be the same amount all the way around.

After the closure and the hem It will be time to dye it. I looked on the Rit website for colors and decided some mixture of Purple and Royal Blue will give me the right color. Lucky me I have some of both left in powder form. I used them to dye my 'magic' skirt.