Saturday, May 29, 2010

Dropwaist Skirts - Not so hard!


Over the past two weeks, I took a class at the Viking Sewing club and learned how to make a tiered skirt and a dropwaist ruffled skirt. I then set out to make one for each of my sisters-- which sounds easy but was a bit challenging considering one was in her last month of pregnancy. Everything turned out really cute.

The basics are simple. First, you want to measure your waist. Cut your elastic to that size plus 4 inches. Cut your top fabric to your waist in length and 9 inches in width. Measure how long you want your skirt to be in total. Subtract 7 from that number and that is how wide you want your ruffle fabric to be. Leave that material as long as you can. You will end up piecing together two or three of these lengths to make the skirt in total. I used the gathering foot on my machine but there are other ruffling methods out there. After you create your ruffle and attach it to the top tier (or if you have the gathering foot, do both in the same step), you sew your bottom hem and sew in your waistband in a double folded fashion. I had each sister try on her skirt so I could cinch in the elastic before I finished the seams.

1 comment:

Baye said...

This gives me the courage to get out there and try again. Very nice!