I'm joining Elizabeth and friends again this week for her online sewing circle, sharing sewing projects and current reads.
I just finished and gifted Anna this bright, bold skirt for her birthday last week.
I came across this fabric, 'Apple of My Eye' and was, smitten with the beautiful patterns, colors, and (you know me) florals. I loved how the different designs look together and so I bethought myself to see if I could make a skirt with the five pieces in this half yard set for my bright and bold skirt loving birthday girl.
The skirt has ten gores, two of each of the five designs of fabric in the set I bought. (I didn't really have a pattern, other than roughly using a {twenty year old} pattern for a {four} gored skirt.) Each of the ten gores is approximately 5.5" wide at the top, 10" at the bottom and approximately 28" long. I couldn't take any pictures of the skirt in progress as it was a surprise gift, but here is a diagram of how I did it:
As you can see, I really maximize the fabric usage to get a full skirt out of the half yard pieces. (Also note, the design direction is sideways in the skirt which doesn't matter for these floral patterns but wouldn't work if you had fabric that had to have a vertical orientation.)
I made each gore straight on one side and flared on the other, pairing them up and sewing the straight sides together first. Then I sewed the five panels together at the sides. I added a solid color waistband, making a casing for elastic. A narrow machine stitched hem on the bottom finished it off, et voilà:
Easy as (apple!) pie. We both love it, and it was jolly fun coming up with the design myself and squeaking it out of my little bundle of fabric.
And speaking of love, I just finished reading my first book by Elizabeth Goudge. I recently found this lovely old copy of Gentian Hill at a book sale, delectable with pleasant green cloth covers and deckle edged cream pages, and I have fallen truly deeply wondrously head-over-heels fast in love with this woman's writing. From the first pages I was totally captivated with the beautiful descriptions of time and place, and then I went on to bask in the exquisite way this writer can grasp the nuggets of truth and beauty and the nature of this earthly life and pour them out into gems of sentences that delight the soul while making the intellect nod in agreement. And then I just marveled and smiled and kind of sighed at the beauty of her words and how well they speak to me. Like the last book I read (In This House of Brede. So, so good.), I am sorely tempted to immediately start it all over again.
Eternity was a fact. Intellectually he had always known it, coldly and without conviction, but now the dry bones of fact seemed slowly to clothe themselves with flesh. Love was not just an emotion to be experienced or an abstraction to be argued about, but the actual stuff of eternal life, and the Curé had known it, as in love with God and man he went to the physical death that was without power to extinguish it in him. And Charles found one day that he knew it too, not as a man awake at midnight knows that the sun exists, but as the same man knows it when the sun has risen and he is steeped in its warmth and light.- Elizabeth Goudge, Gentian Hill
I could steep for a long time in this writer's words.
