Skull Skirt

Hello everyone and welcome to visitors from Sophistique Noir!  I wanted to kick off Red & Black week with something fun and spooky, so I decided I must sew something out of this fabric:

Allow me to present Midnight Madness by Northcott.  I'm not really sure why I bought this fabric (other than, ya know, it's super cool).  I didn't have any particular garment in mind, and I really do have plenty of skull fabric already, but I guess I just couldn't resist.  For those curious, it came from my favorite fabric site, Fabric.com, but they no longer carry it.

I only bought two yards, so I was a bit limited in what I could make.  I don't have all that many long, full skirts, so I figured that would be good.  It would be simple enough to halve two yards of fabric, sew them together, make a casing, and insert elastic, but I'm not all that fond of elastic waists (except in PJs).  Rather than try to find a pattern for something so simple, I just grabbed the waistband from a different skirt.  Readers may recognize Simplicity 9825 from my first pattern review.

That pattern actually zips up the back, and since I wanted to gather the fabric, I moved the zipper to the left side.  Readers may also remember that I almost did that, quite by accident, the first time through.

The next step was gathering the fabric.  I halved the fabric after I cut the waistband and then sewed it together.  To gather, I just used a long stitch and pulled the ends.  A gathering foot would also have worked here, but I don't have one.

The pattern calls for the facing to be hand-sewn in place after sewing the skirt to the waistband.  I just didn't feel like it at the time, so I top-stitched it.  I figured since the stitching would show anyway, I might as well do it in a contrasting color, and in spirit of the theme, I chose red.  And since I'd done the bottom, I figured I'd do the top too.

And I might as well do the hem!

This only took about two hours.  I knocked it off on a weekend in between breakfast and my morning run.  And that time includes several doctor-prescribed kitty-petting breaks.

I'm not sure if I prefer this with the shirt tucked or untucked.  I really balk at tucking in my shirts most of the time.  I know it tends to look sloppy, but they never stay tucked and sometimes look silly.  I think the untucked version gives more shape to the outfit.

 From the back, tucked, and the side, untucked.  My hair is wet, sorry.

And with my favorite new accessory, Lydia.  She was feral, and abandoned by her mother when she was only two weeks old.  A cat rescue found her and took care of her until she was old enough to be adopted.  The poor girl has some serious abandonment issues, but despite her rough start to life, she's sweet and cuddly.  This one wasn't too pleased at first, but seems to have accepted Lydia as a minion in her evil kitty army.

What I'm wearing:
Plain black girly-fit t-shirt: JoAnn's, ~$5
Sandals: Famous Footwear, ~$30
Metal skull bracelet: Spencer's, $7 (probably the first spooky accessory I ever purchased)
Plastic skull bracelet: Some gas station in the Outer Banks, ~$2
Skull earrings: the top and bottom pair are probably from Hot Topic, ~$5; the middle pair is from eBay, ~$2 (I bought them so long ago that the archives don't go back that far)
Skull barrettes: pretty sure these came from Claire's, ~$5

Thanks for reading and stay tuned!  I have posts planned for every day of this event!

Grey? I Prefer "Pastel Black"

..And now for something completely different: a man with a tape recorder up his nose.



To participate in Sophistique Noir's monthly theme post (which is grey), I am going to feature pictures from my first pattern review (posted in the dark days of last week). And you in the back, I can hear you muttering "but you already posted those pictures!" Dear reader, I posted pictures of Azzurra, my sewing dummy, wearing the outfit. This post will feature me wearing the outfit, along with all the accouterments (except shoes).

Without further delay...






Other items featured:
Black tuxedo blouse (purchased at a thrift store for under $5)
Spider web tights by Leg Avenue (purchased from an online retailer - no idea which)
Pocketwatch (gift from hubby)
Spider necklace (probably from Claire's or Hot Topic)
Various spider earrings (the same)

I wore this with black pumps. Many thanks to hubby for taking the pictures.

Skirt & Vest Pics

My apologies for the delay. I took pictures with camera phone and none of them turned out. So I tried again last night with my actual camera and they didn't turn out much better. Ugh. On top of that, I am not the world's greatest photographer. Anyway, these should at least give a sense of how the outfit turned out.

Without further ado, my skirt and vest:







I only felt like I was wearing wallpaper a little bit. The pictures of the back and sides were too blurry, sorry. :/ Here's a close up of the pocket modification.:



I wore this with my pocketwatch (of course!), a black tuxedo blouse (purchased from a thrift store for under $5), opaque black tights, white and black heels, and copious spider jewelry.

First Pattern Reviews

This fabric has been sitting in my fabric stash for a while now:


That's Haunted Mansion by Moda and it is now out of print. When the designer Halloween fabrics come out (usually in June or July), I usually don't jump on them unless I can't live without them (such as the Riley Blake Eerie Alley fabric from two years ago that featured multi-colored hearses - I quite literally squealed with joy). This was no exception: though I'd seen this for sale in several stores and on eBay, I was kinda "meh" about it, especially at designer prices. It grew on me though, and when I saw it on eBay at clearance prices, I snapped up two yards. I had no particular plans for this fabric, but at that price, I couldn't resist.

The fabric has been sitting in my stash since September. I was consumed with other projects and didn't give it much thought. Then when I was finishing up scrubs for my sister a couple of weeks ago, I saw it sitting on top of a trunk, just barely peeking out from some other fabrics I'd purchased (probably under the same "I don't know what I'll do with it, but I have to have it!" philosophy). The idea of it bounced around in my head until I had a "by Jove!" moment - a matching skirt and vest! How could I go wrong?

Well, I had only bought two yards and getting more would be tough, so I had to pick patterns that would be able to squeeze into that tiny amount. A pencil skirt seemed ideal, and well, there isn't a whole lot of variance in vest patterns, so one would be as good as pretty much any other. I went digging through my embarrassingly large pattern collection and came up with Simplicity 9825 (since out of print) and New Look 6008.

First off, I'm going to apologize for the lack of in progress pictures. I was considering starting the blog as I was constructing these pieces. I will post finished pictures later.

The skirt comes in three lengths and in two fullnesses. I made the medium length in the narrow fullness (view B). With my long legs, I figured it would hit me about mid-knee. For work, I would consider the top of the knee as short as I'd go, so it seemed like a good plan. The recommended fabrics are heavier than the quilting cotton I used, but whatever.

This pattern was pretty simple. I left off the trim and faux pockets. The hem length was 1.25 inches, but I halved that to 5/8 - lo and behold, the skirt hit just below the knee (yay). I didn't make the vent as long as the pattern said - shortening it by two inches - and I am able to walk around okay, so I guess that was a win too. Everything about this was win except for the stupid dumb horrible awful mistake I made. I want to stress that this was in no way the fault of the pattern, but all me. Here goes: I was only half paying attention and inserted the zipper on the side instead of the back. That wouldn't have been the end of the world (some skirts do zip up the side, after all), but I panicked and didn't think of the side zip. Instead, I began frantically (and not as carefully as I should have) ripping out the zipper, and ended up snagging the fabric a little. It isn't too noticeable, but I know it's there. After the zipper was inserted into the correct place, everything went swimmingly.

This would probably be a good pattern for beginners. The only real difficult part is inserting the zipper.

As for the vest, I made view A (the lilac-colored one in the lower corner). Now, half the reason to wear vests is so you can sport a dapper pocket watch, and those are flaps without pockets. As always, I modified the vest so it included real pockets. This is a giant pain in the ass, and that's probably why the pattern just has flaps instead of real pockets. Even knowing what I'm doing and having done the pocket insertion several times, the two pockets took longer than the rest of the vest combined. Urgh.

The rest of the pattern went smoothly. As I said, most vest patterns are pretty much the same. The only real differences here the straps (meeting in the middle) and the top-stitching. Honestly, I really liked the top-stitching because it meant no under-stitching. And even with under-stitching, sometimes vests still won't lay flat. One quarter of an inch seems a little large, but one eighth would have been too small. Eh, whatever. It looks good. The other modification I made was the straps: I shortened them by half an inch. This is a typical adjustment for me and shouldn't be seen as the fault of the pattern.

I wouldn't recommend this pattern to someone just starting out, but a beginner with a couple of projects under their belt could probably handle this.

Will try to post pics tonight!