FO: A skirt for twirling

Last term I had to take Youngest to hospital for a check up.  We ended up having plenty of time before the appointment and popped into a travelling fabric sale on the way. The sale is run by M.Rosenberg & Sons and they appear about every 4 weeks. We had a quick look round and Youngest chose some material for a skirt.


I showed her a pattern that I have had for some time, for a mid length, gathered, tiered skirt (OOP McCalls 4816).  That was deemed suitable, with the stipulation that it had the bows, please!

spot the bow!

 Making this skirt was straight-forward, but as ever seemed to take ages.  I did it in small time increments which possibley made it feel like it took a long time.  It did, however, remind me that I really dislike making gathered garments! It took ages to get all the gathers evenly distributed. The instructions for the bows appeared to tell you to cut a rectangle, tie a knot in it, then sew it to the skirt without out appearing to finish any of the raw edges. I did not do this. I cut bigger rectangles, folded each rectangle right sides together, sewed 2 of the 3 raw edges together, turned it right side out, slip- stitched the remaining raw edge, then knotted and sewed to skirt.

Whilst I was plodding along with this, my mother-in-law knocked up a very similar style skirt for Eldest in an afternoon, using a much easier method. My pattern had me cut 2 pieces each for the top two tiers, and three for the bottom layer, sew each layer into a loop then gather and attach.  My M-i-L copied a RTW skirt that had 2 pieces for all three layers. She gathered and attached the front pieces to each other, did the same for the back, then sewed up the sides, which seemed much more sensible!


Youngest is very please with the skirt, and has t-shirts of many clours to go with it!