Scrappy Circle Skirt

Last week, my sewing machine decided to stop working. I couldn't figure out what was wrong, so lost the entire day and a busy week meant a panic as I wasn't able to try and solve the issue. One dose of determination, a decent screwdriver and a tangle of thread and lint from under the baseplate later, and my machine is working! Just two and a half weeks left to finish up my costumes though. So here's the start of a long term project I've been working on as I've not gotten much done this week:

I have long coveted the idea of a scappy skirt, something made with all those little project ends that are too small to become anything useful on their own, but too pretty to throw away. Well, if I want one it's about time I made a start on one.

I picked up some polycotton in purple for the skirt base and drafted out a quick full circle skirt on the folded fabric. Suzie checked the drafting for me, so I felt certain I could proceed with confidence.

By far the best tool in the making of this skirt was the availabilty of a good decent allotment of floor space. I pulled pieces of fabric from my designated scrap box, and tried to arrange them in a way that was visually pleasing without being too rigid about the layout or piece shape.










So far I've discovered that my inner magpie does a lot of my fabric purchasing for me; the final skirt at the moment is aiming towards a very shiny finish. There's also not enough scraps to do all four panels, so each panel is going to end up with it's own distinct character. So I pinned.

And then I pinned some more. And a bit more. And by then my back and knees were making distinctly unhappy noises, so that was all the fabric sorting I was going to get done that evening. The plan is to sew everthing down with a running stitch to stop it shifting about, then to bind each edge with a close zig-zag stitch.

Long term project yes. Panel one already has a lovely weight to it. And it's incentive to get more nice sewing done to replenish my scrap box!