Journey to a Skirt

A while back I had an idea for a skirt.  I'm not quite sure where it came from, but it was a gray skirt, and the bottom of the skirt was pieced fabrics in grays, silver and black, possibly lightly quilted.  The piecing was random, square, rectangular, wide, tall.  I had a vague idea that it might look like a skyline, so in my head I was calling it the Cityscape Skirt.


Fast forward to Tuesday night.  Mario has a class that night and I spend the 3 hours of his absence sewing like a demon.  I made a pair of my favorite TNT pants on Tuesday from some lovely charcoal gray RPL that I got from Gorgeous Fabrics a while back.  Before I started cutting, I realized that if I played my cards right and cut very, very carefully, I would have enough left over to make a pencil skirt.  I already knew I had the other fabrics in either stash or remnants. 


The pants were finished and I was hemming them by the time he got home.  I'd also cut out the pencil skirt and had a small chunk of fabric left over besides.  Amazing what careful cutting can do.


The next night, I cut out a bunch of pieces of black, light gray, silver (a metallic coated cotton) and self fabric and played with layout.  I could see my original idea in my head, but I couldn't make it come together on the table.  Everything looked forced and weird.  Eventually I cut a long strip of the silver coated cotton and the self fabric, sewed them together and cut them in 2" sections.  Those were sewn together in an alternating checkerboard, and I laid it across the bottom of the skirt to see how it looked. 


Hmm.  I couldn't quite tell from there, so I decided just to go with it.  I sewed the patchwork band on the skirt from the underside at the top, then folded and pressed the hem of the skirt and the band.  I had some quilt batting on hand that I didn't use for the 1912 jacket, so I cut a strip of that and put under the band.  I hand-sewed the hem, then topstitched the top of the band.  It looked raised, but not puffy. I was encouraged.  I did a line of stitching down the center of the strip, then started playing around with it.  I sewed X's through each of the gray squares, and then did spirals in the silver squares, pulling the thread tightly to add texture to the silver.  From a distance it looks somewhat like leather.


I'm still not sure where I'm going here, but it's an interesting journey all the same.