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[DW] musings on patterns and whatnot

I've been working on a project for three days or so now. Maybe four, if you count the night I spent cutting pieces of paper so I could tape them together in the morning.

I don't particularly care for print-at-home patterns, by the way.

It's a relatively simple A-line skirt, but it required 54 pages of A4 paper, which needed to be taped together precisely or you get buckling and misaligned things which lead to misshapen or wrongly-sized pieces. No pressure.

I much prefer patterns I've drafted myself but I don't have nearly enough paper to draft as many patterns as I want to. Even after bringing home 5+m from school! I've gotta save that for schoolwork, anyways. (Thanks, CoViD) I've got the underlayer of the front traced off with 1cm seam allowance, though, because of the lining fabric I was trying to use. I needed to be more conservative than Sean Hannity with regards to my fabric, being that I only had half a meter, and frankly I should've ignored the grain line and cut it on the straight grain. Should've, but I didn't. And now that failed lining bit is destined to become face masks, if I can work out the patterns.

a blue piece of fabric lays on the cutting table, abandoned and desolate
The failed lining, may it rest in pieces.

white somewhat skirt-shaped pattern paper laying on the cutting table
My attempts at redrafting the skirt somewhat.
Anyways, it was for a competition and the deadline has now been extended to mid-May, so all this rushing I've done has been completely unnecessary. :v [Note from future-me: I missed the deadline because I thought it was midnight on the 15th rather than midnight on the 14th. Whoops.] But I'll have a new skirt, at least. And I've managed to learn a few lessons:

  1. I hate print-at-home patterns. I will gladly pay too much money for Officeworks to print them out for me.
  2. Always wash your fabric asap, even the stuff you don't have a project in mind for. You never know when you might need a new lining because your planned lining fabric isn't cooperating.
  3. Take pictures of your progress, because there's a bunch of things I should've probably taken photos of to submit for this competition (tracing & modifying the pattern for the underlayer, the failed lining, the basting...) but I didn't. 
  4. I should really get a proper binder to set up as a project Bible. For all my projects, not just the costuming ones.
Everything below this is more on the skirt, from future-me on 21/5/20.

a needle is stuck mid-stitch into the fabric of the skirt waistband. basting is visible to the right, on the main skirt body, and pins to the left on the waistband.
Basting and waistband stitching.
As I was sewing down the waistband, I realized it was actually a pretty good shot of the basting I'd done to keep the lining in place. 
Protip for basting: use a thread that really contrasts your fabric(s) so you can see it. Baste it while it lays flat. Smooth it down constantly. You're not doing it enough, I promise. I am constantly smoothing my fabric layers and I swear it's never enough.

a hand holds the waistband, opened at the seam to see the interior. more basting is visible in the seam allowance.
Waistband interior.
The interior of the waistband was faced with fusing I'd nicked from the scraps bin at school. I cut a length of the main fabric 4 'holes' wide, plus the selvedge (another 2 inches or so) and folded it in half. Perfect, really. I ironed the fusing to the voile, and stitched 'em up, treating the folded main fabric as one piece rather than two.

And then, it sat.

I finally got around to hemming the skirt at the end of April. Loads more trouble than you might think, as I turned under the cotton lining and sewed that to the turned-under part of the second layer.
close view of fabric being fed into sewing machine from the operator's point of view
I do love a good action shot.
Once the hem was sewn it was time to pull out the basting threads. Finally. Out they came!
a hand pulling basting threads out from the skirt
Pulling out the basting...

And then I tried it on. (That was my first mistake.)
As I was taking it off, I literally pulled the zipper pull off the track. I broke the zipper and it hadn't even been outside the sewing room. So it sat in the Naughty Corner for a while, until finally on May 1st I sighed, grabbed the seam ripper, and sat down to rip.

a hand holding one side of a zipper while a seam ripper sits artfully placed nearby, because the photographer only has two hands.
Rip, rip, rip. Sigh.

I put a new zipper in and sewed up the holes I'd had to make. For finishing touches, of course, a tag saying THIS IS THE BACK, because it's one of those things I'd be liable to forget otherwise. 

a photograph of the back of the skirt, focused on a tag sewn just below the waistband that reads "This is the back." The front of the skirt is folded down so the tag is visible.
THIS IS THE BACK
And of course, what you've all been waiting for, pics of me in the skirt itself. It's pretty cute,

The author poses for the camera in the backyard: her right hand is on her hip and she is turned half away from the camera to show the side of the skirt. She wears a handknit shawl, a green shirt, the cream skirt that is the subject of this post, navy tights, and black Oxford shoes.The author poses for the camera: facing forward, the author has her left hand on her hip, showing the front of the skirt. She is wearing the same clothes as in the other photo.
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