Ever since I made my last skirt/pattern, I've been wanting to use it upside down to make a classic A-line skirt. So I did! I had to make the pattern a little shorter because I didn't buy enough fabric. (I'm always doing stupid things like that. I mis-calculate because I get too excited about the end product!)
All done! Flat and wrinkly on my floor. That's cotton for you.
reg. wear style
tucked in
side
I wanted to show you my seams. You're supposed to do a "seam finish" on all your seams so you don't have to little flaps of fabric on every edge of your outfit, fraying and thus your clothes eventually disintegrating off of your body.
THIS ^ is a "french seam", which is known as an "enclosed seam"- which is what I did for this skirt. It's classy, and really quite easy! Here are some other ways to do it:
This is what you'll see on most mass-produced, store bought clothes. A surged seam. (And incidentally this is NOT a skirt I made.)
These are some pajama pants I made in my first sewing class at BYU-Idaho. My teacher told us after we were well under way that we had to do seam finishes. So this is called an overcast stitch. Or something. It's just a zig-zag stitch over the raw edge to keep it from fraying.
Another technique we were taught was simply to "pink" the edges! (Which you do simply by cutting the fabric with pinking shears- which are scissors with a zig-zag!) You can really only do that on a fabric that doesn't fray much. This skirt is one of the first things I made after college and it's actually held up quite well through the washer and dryer with me only doing this seam finish. And I was really just being lazy, not knowledgable in this case. Seam finishes can be a drag, which is why it's nice to do the French seam- because you do it at the very beginning instead of at the end when you're just ready to be done with the thing.
This is what you'll see on most mass-produced, store bought clothes. A surged seam. (And incidentally this is NOT a skirt I made.)
These are some pajama pants I made in my first sewing class at BYU-Idaho. My teacher told us after we were well under way that we had to do seam finishes. So this is called an overcast stitch. Or something. It's just a zig-zag stitch over the raw edge to keep it from fraying.
Another technique we were taught was simply to "pink" the edges! (Which you do simply by cutting the fabric with pinking shears- which are scissors with a zig-zag!) You can really only do that on a fabric that doesn't fray much. This skirt is one of the first things I made after college and it's actually held up quite well through the washer and dryer with me only doing this seam finish. And I was really just being lazy, not knowledgable in this case. Seam finishes can be a drag, which is why it's nice to do the French seam- because you do it at the very beginning instead of at the end when you're just ready to be done with the thing.There are other ways to do seam finishes but these are the only ones I have really done myself. Not that I did the serged hem, because I don't have a serger.
The end!
Til next time...
