The silver leopard print satin that I used to make the now the destined-for-my-mother’s-closet Drama Queen Jacket (McCall 5487) was actually purchased without a plan in mind. I generally try not to purchase fabric without having a specific garment for it, as I try to keep my stash relatively small (though it has been growing a bit in recent months, to my chagrin.) But in a way, leopard is its own kind of neutral and makes sense for a variety of garments, so there was no doubt that I’d find a use for it. And I guess I did.

But prior to deciding on the jacket I was playing with the fabric in front of the mirror, and I wrapped it around my waist and turned to Dan and said, “How about a pencil skirt?” He looked at me and his eyes lit up and he exclaimed, “Oooh, cute!” And while I’m not generally the type to make an effort to cater to my guy’s taste in matters of dress, the delighted expression on his face sort of sealed the deal. Plus it did look pretty cute as a quasi-skirt. I did all kinds of interesting fabric acrobatics when cutting out the McCall jacket to make sure there would be enough left over for something like this J.Crew skirt ($138 and sold out!):

Don’t worry, I won’t style it like this. I will not tuck a tie into my waistband and I will (probably) brush my hair. Sloppy-from-the-waist-up is a look that models can pull off and make it look intentional and chic. On me, it’d just look, well, sloppy from the waist up :)

One of my prolific sewing-blogging heroes has been whipping up adorable pencil skirts right and left lately and doing plenty of legwork on pattern and style reconnaissance. Unfortunately for me, I don’t have any of those patterns, and I decided that I should just put on my big girl panties and draft one already. I mean really. A pencil skirt is practically a sloper, and I already have one of those. And what’s the point of having taken drafting classes if you can’t be bothered to flex your drafting muscles every so often? But the thought of pulling out the craft paper was somehow so daunting for your very lazy, Selfish Seamstress.

So I went with the easy route:

That’s the high-waisted pencil skirt #138 from Burda’s main collection, I think only available as a download.  It was on sale for 99 cents (lots of their downloads are on sale at the moment on the German website – just be sure you’re comfortable navigating the German online ordering system if you want something because I am not going to hold your hand and translate!), and that seemed to be a fair price for some continued laziness. Here’s their finished garment photo:

As you can see, the model and I have practically the same figure, so I think this should work out just fine.