The thoughts, sewing projects, and fabric oglings of a dedicated sewist.

Old School Rickrack

7/28/15
So wikipedia just informed me that rickrack's popularity peaked in the 1970's. I'm sure my mom stitched it onto the clothes that she sewed me, although I have no physical evidence of this. Our living room at the time was on trend (avocado and vitamin pee yellow dominated the color scheme) so I'm sure she was hip to rickrack.

Hi! Yes, it's me! I started a new job at the beginning of March that messed with my blogging schedule and just generally turned my life upside down for a while. I had to choose between sewing and writing/reading about sewing, and I went with the former. I'm probably only writing this post because I'm on vacation this week (kids are with grandma, D and I are home alone . . .). But if feels good to write something more substantial about sewing instead of sporadically posting photos on Instagram.

If I do manage to blog about sewing again I have some fun projects to show. I made jeans for starters! And another Style Arc Marni jacket and some tops and other random things. But this post is about a skirt.

I've had a version of this skirt in my head for about three years. I wanted a flared skirt to replace a simple flared skirt that was damaged by some zinc oxide and never really recovered. I found an Alexander Henry quilting cotton that was a good reverse of the original skirt (that one was black with beige/white embroidery). But I felt like something was missing so it never got made up. This spring I worked on a skirt for a client and I found the inspiration I needed: rickrack! The skirt needed rickrack!


I drafted this skirt using the By Hand London quarter circle skirt tutorial (genius! circle skirts math simplified, with an app no less). I used the waistband from my skirt sloper, then measured the bottom edge of the waistband and used that as my waist circumference for the circle skirt. Well, this is what I did after I cut it out too small the first time. For the hem band, I rather haphazardly cut out and edge using the bottom edge of my circle skirt as a guide. I inserted black rickrack between the waistband and skirt, and skirt and hem band:





And I made the extra effort of using a hem facing, and I really like how this turned out (and it made hemming the circle skirt edge easier to do):


I lined the skirt with cotton poplin and inserted an invisible zipper through the center back seam (the only seam in the circle skirt!) and I was done. I'm glad I waited, because this is exactly what I wanted. I like how the skirt bells away from my body due to the crispness of the cotton, and I like that the embellishment makes it look just that bit fancier (if rickrack counts as fancy).




I hope all of you are having a fabulous summer with lots of fun sewing projects and plenty of summer cocktails!