Sunday, November 30, 2008

Dress-up Box - Dance Skirts


Ah, it is good to be back home after being away for
Thanksgiving. We all missed our beds. I did not miss cooking,
because food cooked by other people just always tastes
better. Now we miss the family we'd just left to come home.
But we will see them again at Christmas, which, because
Thanksgiving was so late this year, is not all that long off.

Here are some sheer dance skirts that will go into the girls'
Dress-up Box. These chiffony fabrics were on sale after
Halloween, so I bought a yard of each and made full circular
skirts in different colors and lengths.


Circular skirts cut from fabric with square corners leave a
fair bit of remnant, so the scraps became four fairy skirts
with five different-colored panels each. Emily's Halloween
costume also left some sizable remnant pieces so they
became pink-and-sparkle skirts.

Here is a hastily taken picture of the fairy and pink skirts,
carelessly tossed on our deck. I wish the pictures could
have shown them modeled by human wearers but they
are supposed to be a secret afterall. Alas.

Real dance skirts have ties for waist adjustment but these
are for little girls who are learning to dress on their own.
So I used FOE (fold-over elastic) for the waistbands and it
made very quick work of the eleven skirts. The serging of the
edges, though, took a while - I used embroidery thread and
that kept breaking. Thank goodness for sergers, but
how maddening to have to keep rethreading!


Seven of these skirts will go into the Box and the other
four will find new homes with some other little girls.

I didn't have time to make a tutorial on this, but it is really
nothing more than cutting a large donut-shaped piece of
fabric, serging the outer circular edge and sewing FOE on
the inner circular edge. Here's an FOE tutorial that I didn't
actually use (I only watched it after I'd finished the skirts)
but that is very helpful.

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