.. but is now a bit of sewing that I did over the weekend.

I am still trying to get around my fear of my own sewing machine. Given than I still need the manual to work out how to fill a bobbin, insert it, and then load the silly thing, you’d have thought there was little hope for me. Hell, I thought that.

But prior to having to dig up the manual, I spent a day looking through patterns, finding one, picking a fabric, and then getting to the business of cutting the paper patterns and then cutting the pieces.

Now, I’ve worked out it’s a bit like the knitting. I love knitting, and I love starting new projects, but man, I hate casting on. If I could get someone else to do the casting on and counting and checking of numbers of stitches for me, that would be grand, but no such luck of course. It’s the same with sewing. The cutting pieces part is a bit of a pain, but there you go.

The stitching together is where all the fun is. After some careful pinning and working out where the 5/8″ marker is on my sewing machine, I was off. And the current result is this:

This is a McCall’s pattern, M5430, and it’s pretty simple as long as you check which side of the fabric you’re meant to be marking and cutting. Which, well, I got a little bit wrong, because my skirt is the reverse of what the pattern indicates.

Luckily, as ever, Ruth was on hand to help me out. What I haven’t photographed are the pieces for the waistband, which I’d already done correctly, had my skirt been the right way around. So her idea was to just reverse the waistband pieces. Which was a lot easier than having to consider cutting a couple of new pieces and needing more fabric.

The photo above also shows that I corrected the pleating so that it falls in the way my skirt needs it to, rather than what the pattern tells me. So I feel a little bit smart for that.

The fabric is a cotton/spandex blend, which is great because cotton’s probably the safest thing for me to work with as a first project, but the spandex means that there is a bit more weight and heft to the fabric, which gives it a really nice drape. I love it.

The skirt’s going to hang for a while just to get it settled before I start on the hemming. Which to me feels like a whole other box of frogs…