Thursday, January 30, 2014

Sewing Stuff - Blues Skirt Part 1

One of the things that I've noticed that comes with doing Burlesque is that you tend to only use your sewing skills for costumes and the occasion hemming of pants/skirts. This Christmas though my trusty sidekick (aka my boyfriend) bought me a sewing dress form and a gift card to dressew and while the tempation to use it for show stuff was there (wooo totally free fancy costumes!!) I decided to ONLY use it for/on myself.

By this I mean I want to use it on things that I want to either learn how to sew or things I will wear in my day to day life. Some examples are:

 swing trousers


these adorable dresses (I don't want a moose pattern but I love the style of the collar and the bust line of the second one)
and of course the one I've chosen for my first project:

The Blues Skirt.

A few weeks back a friend of mine sent me a video of a blues/swing dance competition, and while the first thing I did was get inspired from the amazing dance moves I also found myself loving the outfit that the one lady was wearing. I re-watched the video and took screen caps and decided that was not only a very cute style (the buttons are adorable!), looked easy, but most of all the skirt looked super comfortable to dance in.
Which is something I like to keep in mind when buying/making clothes for myself, I do a lot of swing and blues dancing and nothing looks more hilarious than doing the 'i need to adjust my hemline or bra' dance while you're out and about.

So off I went to dressew and bought myself some fabric and buttons, originally I wanted to get a nice dark blue jean material but none of it was stretchy enough for my liking. And if I plan on dancing in this skirt it's going to need some give to it, the 'adjusting hem' dance is bad but the 'I split open my skirt' dance is even worse. So instead of getting jean material I wound up with a nice true blue stretch material that I think will work just as well, I also got some white buttons.

In total the materials cost me a whopping 15$. Woaaaah big spender right?

Next up will be the actual construction of the skirt which I hope to do either this weekend or next. So stay tuned to see what the results are!