Finished!…Almost

Well, all the major work is done…now to making sure all the threads are clipped and seams are pressed and a final steaming!

Here’s the top up close:

And the skirt:

Now just a technical note here…How did I get the skirt to stand out like that at the bottom? Well, besides the cut of the dress, the answer is twofold.

1. Netting! Now I had a fight with the netting to get it to behave the way I wanted it to. First I had 3 layers of gathered netting: two shorter really gathered layers and a long slightly gathered layer on top of those to try and even it out. What I got was a poofy middle of the skirt and a droopy bottom so it looked like a ball was hiding under the dress or kind of mushroomy and not at all what I was going for!

So I decided to put a tiny, really gathered layer of netting at the very bottom to make sure it stood out well. Well this was eventually the fix, but I initially placed it in the wrong place. I put it on the lining, under the rest of the netting. WRONG. I had to take it all off, remove the not so gathered layer of netting that was over everything and then attach the short really gathered netting to the outermost layer of netting. All that to say, what is there now is a medium lenth gathered netting layer under another medium length layer placed higher up, to which was attached the short really gathered layer of netting as you see here:

2. Horse hair braid! To those of you who do this type of sewing, this is a no brainer, but for some reason it wasn’t my first thought. Only when I saw the mushrooming effect of the netting did I think – OH YEAH! I don’t know how I could have forgotten!

I imagine once upon a time this stuff was actually made of horse hair, but nowadays it’s synthetic. What it does is provide stiffness at the hem to make full skirts stand out.

So there it is, the right combination of netting and horse hair braid makes a happy skirt!

Now, on to my next project: Pillows for Maya. Here’s the fabrics…

Maya just closed escrow on an adorable 1930’s cottage! You can follow the renovations by visiting her blog Flavors of Cottage Life. Oh, and she posts yummy recipes too!