One last refashion - circle skirt dress

OK, last one today, I promise, then I'll move on to something different. Way back in June, I made a skirt for Venetia, out of a beautiful embroidered table cloth, using the bottom strip of a stretchy, jersey top as the top of the skirt - find it here if you're interested. So basically, I had the rest of the top lying around waiting to be used.

Having learnt my lesson with sizing on the scrappy tunic top, this time I chopped off the arms and trimmed up the sides and shoulders before continuing.

Apologies for the sideways photo, it's just too late in the day to go back now and rotate it, please turn your head slightly if required!

Once it was a good fit I sewed the arms back on, and then it was time to think about the skirt. It's just a simple circle skirt (I found this tutorial very helpful when I made vintage sheet circle skirts a while back), but once I got to the elasticating waist point I stopped. Instead of creating an elasticated waist band I wanted to attach it directly to my top. Both fabrics have a fair amount of stretch in them so it was very straightforward, just right sides together sewing, gathering the circle skirt evenly and pinning first. But just to add an extra element, I also cut a strip of contrasting red fabric (another stretchy fabric, so no problems there), ironed it in half and then inserted this between my top and skirt sandwich, with the raw edges of the red strip upwards.

Perhaps this might make more sense in a photo, or perhaps not, unfortunately it's not overly easy to show clearly in a photo!

So here's my skirt, gathered and pinned to the top, right sides together, and slotted in between these 2 layers is my folded red strip, the lovely, neat folded edge is downwards and hidden in this photo, so that this is the edge which will actually be on the 'right' side once it's sewn.

Just a bit closer.

Once that was sewn, I just added a border of wide and very pretty ribbon to the hem and it was finished. 

It's another really comfy one.

So now it's sewn and turned out the right way, my contrasting red strip is all lovely and neat.

And a reasonably useful one rather than just nice to make, because, despite a bulging wardrobe, almost all Venetia's dresses are very Summery, whereas this one is obviously perfect for Autumn, and through to Winter too with some warm accessories.

You can just about see, the skirt fabric is blue with white polka dots, it was an ancient fabric of my Mum's, I'm not sure if she ever made anything with any of it but there was a good, large chunk of it stashed away, which was handy because circle skirts eat a lot of fabric!

It has the twirl factor, but I'm rubbish at catching it in a photo, especially as the light is fading!

 I think it's going to become one of Venetia's favourites.

That's it for the refashions then, but happily there's more sewing going on around here at the moment still to share.

Sally.