Springtime skirts

A quick, short post this time. I made 4 skirts in 2 days before our family holiday with all the grand-daughters. 

As you can see, three of them were made with purchased waistband elastic (which I'd had to get from the US). I've got slightly mixed feelings about this, which I'll reflect on below. But it certainly made them quick to make, at least the top right and bottom left, which are both made from stretchy knit fabric. More about how I made them below.

Skirts #2 and #3 were made the same way. The girls chose their own fabric. They called the top one 'dinosaurs' which was excited them and both wanted a skirt of this fabric. There is enough left from the first one to make a second smaller one later. However, Fleur and Rose's Mum and I both thought the design shows elephants. Better call them dinosuar elephants in case the idea of elephants is less exciting than dinosuars!

The second one is a butterfly print, which Rose claimed for her 'second' skirt. (As well as a 'dinosaur' one. But she will have that in the next round - I was bored with red dinosaur elephants and wanted a change,)

I do have a bit of a problem with these. The idea of using this waistband elastic came from here , here  and here. The basic idea is that you mark both the elastic and the fabric - which should be much wider) into quarters - actually I marked into eighths) and pin together at these marks. Then you stretch the elastic as you go to gather up the material. However, I found that the elastic I'd bought from the US wasn't actually very stretchy. (It came from Strapcrafts. They had plenty of choice of colours , whereas only black and white seem to be available in the UK, and shipping was reasonable by the time I'd boughht 7 different colours.)

So when I tried to attach the waistband to the babric, I stretched as hard as I could, but it wouldn't stretch enough to give me a very full skirt. So I think both the skirts look a little narrow.. Last year, I made some with a piece of elastic I happened to have off another garment - and that worked fine, giving me a fuller skirt. So the moral is, you need to find really stretchy elastic to perform this trick. 

When it came to the third skirt, I thought I'd try a different tack. n any case, the material for Jane's skirt was 100% cotton (love that unicorns design!) so wouldn't have any additional stretch. So I first ran a gathering thread loosely round the top (with a narrow zigzag so it would have a little give once the elastic was attached). Again, I stretched the elastic as hard as I could.

I I also added a frill on the bottom to give more fullness. (Jane likes frilly. But Fleur would never accept a frilly skirt - it's trying something to get herr into a skirt at all.)

Fnially, by the time I got to the baby's skirt, I was fed up with elastic waistbands. (Though I'll have another go in future.) So I just used the conventional method of making a waistband of the self fabric and threading 3/4" elastic through. This was again a knit fabric.

In fact, to gain some extra fullness, I made the skirt itself 2 x her waist measurement of 45cm, but instead of just turning over the top, which I thought would be very bulky on such a tiny skirt, I made a separate waistband only about 1 1/4 times her waist, and gathered the material into the waistband. So the waistband itself isn't as heavily gathered.

We'll see how these go down before I make any more! I've ordered some further elastic from another source, I'll see if that is any more stretchy.