Easter Weekend Sewing Marathon

I am all alone over the Easter weekend, as hubby is taking the dog down to see his family, and I have a course on the Saturday so can't join them.

To keep me from feeling too sorry for myself, or from munching my way through all the Easter eggs, I have planned a marathon sewing weekend, and will attmpt to finish three skirts...am I mad!!!

The first one is already almost done, and is my curtain lining Burda skirt.  My zip arrived from Plush Addict so I can get that inserted and pin up my hem.  I plan to just do a basic turned up hem with a straight stitch, so should be easy enough.  Plan is to finish this on Friday morning.

Skirt 2 is New Look 6056

This looks like a super easy pattern, the biggest challenge will be the tracing and cutting out as the pieces are huge! You need 4.7m of fabric for this one, so I got 5m of this lovely polycotton from Greens Fabric and it was only £2.50 a meter! It is a bit thin, so I have also got 5m of a blue lining fabric from Pennine Fabrics who are a dream to deal with, happy to help and will offer suggestions or alternatives to help you out.

I am hoping to do most of this on Friday afternoon, so that I can take it to my friends' house on Saturday night for a bit of help pinning up the hem.  By Sunday, I should have my new blind hemming foot, so planning to try that with this one.

My final skirt was one I found on a blog post, and thought it looks so easy I had to try it. One Simple Bliss gives really clear instructions and lots of photos to help, so I bought an increadibly fun jersey print to make it with, and a 50mm elastic for the waistband.  The material was £5.99 for a meter, so more than I normally spend, but I only needed a meter so felt I could justify it.

So, am I crazy or is this possible?

Burda 7042 - Making up part 1

Having done all my initial cutting and marking, the next stage was to start making the pieces into a skirt.

First of all, I set up my sewing machine, and put my magnetic seam guide (a Hemline one which was about £3.00) on the footer plate to help guide my material at the correct seam allowance.  I find sewing to a regular width very difficult, so I did find this guide to be a help.

I decided to use a fairly small stitch length, unfortunately my sewing machine model (Brother JK1700) does not have an adjustible stitch length, so I had to just pick what looked best from the stitch guide on the machine.

Using the guide to help, I did a few stitches, then reversed the machine and went back over them to secure.  After that I just slowing worked my way down to the bottom, where I used the integrated thread cutter to snip off the work. I did this to all 4 sets of panels, and then pressed the seams open.

The fabric frayed quite badly when I was cutting out, so I knew I would have to neaten the seams.  I decided to do the easy option of running a zigzag stitch along the seam and then snipping the fabric close to the edge of this.  I used quite a small stitch length, I did try a longer one but found it hard to control.

The photo above shows the unfinished and finished seam, I didn't press the seam after this, so it looks a bt wavy, but after pressing was lovely and straight.

It was only after I did this that I realised that if I did this to all the seams, I would not be able to let the skirt out if I had made it a bit on the small side.  Definitely something to remember in future.

I then sewed the larger panels together, but did not join them into a full circle.  As I currently don't have a zip for the skirt, I couldn;t do the next part of the instructions, so I skipped forward a bit.

The next step was putting in a tuck along the line marked in the centre of each small panel.  To do this, I first folder the fabric along the line, and then pressed in place.  The instructions called for this part to be stitched at 1/8", which was not marked on my machine.  I did try to guess, but ended up with a tuck 2/8" wide, which over the whole skirt would have made it a full inch narrower, so I unpicked it all and tried another method.

I measured 1/8" from the needle, and put a bit of masking tape on the footer plate to be my guide.  Thankfully this worked, and I was able to put all these tucks in place.

I pressed the tucks to the side, and put the skirt round me to check fit.  I can't have been holding it right as the photo looks a bit squint, but overall I think it's looking good.

I have ordered a zip from eBay, which I hope will arrive soon, and then I will be able to do the next section of adding the zip and waistband.

Any tips for the zipper insertion? I don't have an invisible zipper foot, so I have just ordered a normal one, and hopefully I can work it out.