Inspiration Comes From All Places

Portugal, in fact.

Thanks, Tany, for the idea! If you haven' seen Tany's Orwell Coat, you'd better click yourself over to her blog and take a look! To me, it's fabulous. She's done a great job with it and gives you all the juicy construction details in not only English, but Portuguese as well! Over on the right, in her label list, you'll find all the posts for the Orwell Coat Here's a snapshot of the original on the runway:

When I saw this skirt from Burda WOF Jan. 07 (yes, Ann, I'll return it to you - it's safe in the Tyvek bag at the moment!), I knew exactly how I'd make it up. Here's my version of the skirt, Orwell style, complete with handstitching:

I switched the colors because I'd like to wear this skirt this spring/summer. The black and white theme seems to work with this summer's trends. The fabric is a really nice brushed twill, soft to touch, but with body like twill.

I traced off the Burda pattern in my correct hip size, and figured the waist would be way to big. It was, check the photo below on the right side. See how much space there is? Both sides were like that before I fixed the other one. (Don't I have just the ugliest muslin fabrics? This is one way to get them out of the stash!)

Fixing this wasn't straight forward; this skirt doesn't have side seams. The yoke has a side seam, but the skirt portion has backs that wrap to the front and join at that big upside down U-shaped seam. In the photo below, you can see how much I had to remove from the yokes. You can barely see the original seam, and the new seam is the black marker line. I took out about 1" at the waist edge and tapered it down to about 1/2" at the yoke seam. I still needed to taper from 1/2" to 0" below that seam line. This wouldn't be a problem with a regular side seam - I'd just keep tapering, in this case there's some excess fabric to deal with.

To solve this problem, I moved that excess fabric to the back and created another back dart with it. In the picture below, you can just make out two darts to the left of the black line. The black lines indicate actual dart placement. With two darts, I had to shift the position of the original single dart to make sure it looked balanced.

I did change the way the back vent was treated. Burda instructions have the vent extensions pressed to one side and stitched down with a line of diagonal stitching once all the edges are finished. I chose to press each side of the vent to the side, and then hand stitch the lining over it for a clean finished look. Here's what it looks like from the wrong side of the lining, on the left the lining has been stay-stitched, clipped and pressed back.

In the next photo, you can see what I did to arrive at the photo above. The solid lines indicate stay-stitching lines, while the slashed lines are those that are cut or clipped.

Here's the completed vent from the inside:

Parting Shot: I've been working on the pink side of the vest today.

For the rest of the week, I'm going to concentrate on the vest, it has a deadline at the end of March, and there's a lot of hand beading that needs to be done. I'm also going to get that photo shoot done for my daughter. I got her Easter fabric in the mail today - it's vintage, and I'll share it when I get the vintage pattern that goes with it.