If you’re sewing for yourself right now, raise your hands in the air and yell “WOOT!”

WOOT!

Haha, we looked dumb doing that. Whatever, I’m sewing for ME! Not a trace of goodwill towards others in sight, which is just how I like it. And the leopard pencil skirt is underway!

You’ll recall I started with this high-waisted pencil skirt downloaded from Burda:

I muslined this up and as it turns out, high-waisted skirts work much better if you actually have a waist, rather than some undefined mass of flesh between your ribs and your hips which is roughly the same circumference as your waist and hips. So, snippy snippy snip and now here we are:

I dropped the top edge to about an inch below the natural waist, and brought the hem up by about 3 inches. Then I added a 3 inch wide thing at the top- I’m not sure if it qualifies as a yoke, or whether it’s just a really wide waistband. I closed up the darts on the waistband and smoothed it out. The neat benefit of the yoke/waistband thing is it eliminates the darts in the skirt entirely (I’m easing out the tiny remaining darts in the back so as not to have two goofy teensy darts). This is not only nice and clean, but it saves me from having to sew the darts. Don’t get me wrong, I *will* sew darts when a design calls for them, and I’m certainly a capable dart-sewer.  But for some reason (I don’t think it’s just laziness, but maybe?) I just never like sewing darts. I find it weirdly unenjoyable.

Ok. So all that done, I pulled out some crazy stretch cotton sateen with some crazy huge fruit punch-colored roses and whipped up a muslin (it’s not hemmed, no zipper, back vent is just kind of hanging open at the moment):

The fabric is some stuff I got off of eBay a while ago, thinking it was going to look more like a 1950’s classic rose print, but never used because it, um, doesn’t. I get the feeling that a bunch of people are going to exclaim that the love this fabric and I should wear the muslin, and a bunch of people are going to say, “yuck!” I’m not going to get into that debate. Dan seems to be taken with it. Amazingly and coincidentally, through no effort of my own, the print actually ended up blending pretty well at all the seams (look at that side seam, and the yoke seam!), so it *could* conceivably be de-muslin-ified. It just looks so much like fruit punch.

Here’s the front view- the fit is working out great for me, and I think I might be well on my way to a go-to pencil skirt pattern.  The only change I think I’m going to make now is to drop the front center waist a smidge. Otherwise it’s nice and slim but not binding.

Am I imagining things or am I making a vaguely Trena face here?  If so, I think that’s a good thing :) She cute. Does anyone else see it? [UPDATE: OMG! I was so sucked in by staring at my face before that I didn’t notice the really weird thing about this picture. What is going on with my right hand?? Does it look like some weird teeny rubber hand or something? Eww it’s so weird! Why’s it so small and squishy looking?  Creepy.]

Ok, keep your eyes peeled for more skirt!