I’m a little obsessed with making pencil skirts right now.
I mean.
They are. The easiest skirts to make!
(sorry for the dramatics)
But I’m not kidding!
20 minutes….DONE.
I need to keep churning these suckers out.
And you should too. (Get the full Pencil Skirt Tutorial HERE)
A couple changes I made this time around:
I used 2-inch wide elastic (rather than 1-inch)…which I was on-the-fence about at first (because elastic widths are an important use for brain bandwidth). But I thought the 2-inch would be too wide and almost too tight at the top. Instead, I totally love it!
It actually holds me in better.
Which seems funny to note. But I love clothing that helps me “suck it in”….like the denim shorts I wear all summer long. Who knows, maybe I would have loved wearing a corset back in the day? Of course corsets didn’t have 5% spandex thrown in.
I’ll stick to my shorts.
And pencil skirts.
Okay, the second change is that I used a cover stitch for the waistband and the hem.
YES! This was my first time using a cover stitch machine!…which might sound foreign to some of you. A cover stitch is similar to an overlock stitch on a serger, but it has two parallel straight stitches on one side, and overlock stitch on the other side. It’s that stitch you see at the bottom of every T-shirt hemline, on swim suits, on skirts, pants, etc. It’s everywhere! You’ve probably seen a thousand times without even realizing it.
And I got to try out the fancy coverstitching at Baby Lock Sewing Headquarters this week!
I’ve been working with them for about a year now (maybe you remember the yards and yards of ruffled streamers I sewed for their even last year?). Well they invited a group of bloggers, sewers, and brand partners out to their facility in St Louis again, so we could learn more about their machines, eat cupcakes with friends, and share ideas with each other.
Which means….I got to hang out with Katy Dill, Kate, Melissa, Stef, and the Simple Simon girls for 2 days!
It’s such a treat to meet blogging friends in real life (like when I met Rae and Deborah)
Of course I love putting a voice with their writing style….but what I love more is hearing the laugh that goes along, and finding out which dry shampoo brand Kate loves (rather than the cheap Suave stuff I’ve been using), and listening to Liz and Elizabeth tell the funniest life stories while we sit eating pancakes at Denny’s at midnight. You find out how poised and detail-oriented Katy is (okay, you already knew that). But really, she has the most soothing, calm voice. I sound like I’m vomiting conversation next to her. Melissa is funny and witty and knows so much about so many things. And Stef has the most amazing hair! She’s just adorable and so smart.
Okay, I’ll stop rambling.
And share my favorite part of the event….
Every year Liz and Elizabeth host a sew-along called Skirting the Issue, where anyone can make skirts during July/August, mail them in, and the skirts are donated to foster care children. It’s such a cool project and such an easy way to give. Because how hard is it to make skirt?? 20 minutes.
So they brought the project to the Baby Lock event and asked if we would help by sewing skirts together, right there in the same room.
Riley Blake fabrics donated yards of knit fabrics and we started sewing. We focused on making skirts for teenage girls. So we sewed knit pencil skirts, hoping that each girl could have a new outfit for the first day of school.
And in about an hour the group had sewn 60 skirts! 60!
It was a humbling sight to see all those skirts hanging on the wall.
If you want more info about how you can help with Skirting the Issue, head over to Simple Simon (the event hasn’t started yet for this year—I believe it starts in July. But that link will give you info on how it all works).
Thank you Baby Lock and thank you friends for a wonderful two days.
And thank you for Riley Blake for all the extra fabric (we were also able to make our own skirts during open-sew time) I’ll think of it as my souvenir skirt.
