Twirly gathered skirt

I made a lovely gathered skirt for my eldest grand daughter, Miriam. She loves to wear skirts and she loves to dance, so it just seemed very appropriate to make her a skirt that spun out as she twirled about in her play.


Basically I followed Elizabeth's tutorial here to make this for 3 year old Miriam. My one major difference is that I doubled the length of each tier, so that when it was finished it would flare out like a circular skirt.
Here are the exact measurements I used for Miriam's skirt. In hind sight the top tier would have been nicer had it been fuller.

Top tier-- 10cm (4 inches) by 75cm (29 inches)
Middle tier--10cm (4 inches0 by 150cm (close enough to 60 inches)
Bottom tier-- 14cm (5 1/2 inches) by 300cm (120 inches)
The last tier is a bit longer only because I needed a longer skirt for my grand daughter. The first 2 tiers I tried to make the most of the heart pattern printed on the material.


I chose a fine corduroy material since it is winter and using colours from within the patterns on the material I used lovely colour ribbons as contrast details.
I used the overlocker to trim all the edges.

 

 Next I sewed the elastic casing


I thought it might be easier if I applied the trims before I did the gathering. However after doing the first two, I decided it wasn't necessarily easier after all and went back to applying the ribbon trim after gathering and sewing it together.



You will see that with the blue ribbon, I thought it would be interesting to add some textural detail by doing some random folds and twists as I went along the 'line'. You can also see that I didn't baste the ribbon but used the pins and pulled them out as I went along with the sewing foot.

 

With the bottom tier, I turned up the hem and used the sewing of the ribbon to also sew the hem.


So there you have it: one happy dancing little girl.


I have entered this skirt in the Throwback Linky Party here.

An Alli Event

1 comment:

  1. a lovely skirt. thanks for the inspiration or should I say inkspiration LOL Sandi Mulholland

    ReplyDelete

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