Mini Wardrobe - August 2008

I'm finished. Somebody say, "Hallelujah!"

It's Labor Day weekend. I've finished laboring; now I'm going to go sit in the sun like a turtle.

A Tale of Two Skirts

The mini wardrobe entry is going to consist of the Chanel jacket, a top and two skirts. I was going to make one skirt and a pair of pants, but I have quite a few pants and I'm trying to get into wearing more skirts. Besides, the one skirt I really wanted to make had to be brown, and I just didn't see myself getting a lot of wear out of olive green pants. Maybe I would, but the fabric definitely would rather be a skirt.

The first skirt is BWOF 8/08 #121, the fitted skirt with the godets at the bottom. The photo in the magazine caught my eye - it actually shows the skirt instead of hiding it - and the line drawing was even better. I liked that the godets were cut with the skirt, rather than having separate godet pieces which are always such fun to line up. The skirt ended up really full at the bottom, but quite fitted at the top. Actually, what I put in the review (drafted, but not yet up) is that this is a booty skirt. Seriously. If you have one and want to conceal it in any way, find another pattern. If you have one and want to show it off, or if you don't have much and want to make it look better, get your tracing paper now. Seriously.

The second skirt is BWOF 2/08 #111, the pencil skirt with the sewn-on bands. I didn't like this at all in the magazine when it came out. But then again I didn't really like anything in that issue, and now I've made two things and have a few more on the radar. Sometimes it just takes a while to sink in. The original plan was to topstitch the bands in brown, gold and green, to match the jacket and the other colors in the min-wardrobe, but I tried that on a scrap of the fabric and just didn't like it. Topstitching in green will at least give me the option of wearing the skirt with different things.

Both of these skirts fit without alteration in a size 38, which makes me happy. Usually I have an issue with BWOF skirts in that while I may have hips, they are apparently not in the same place that BWOF thinks they should be, because I always need to adjust the hip curve. Not this time. I think for the brown skirt there were just so many pieces it gave a really flattering fit without having to tweak. For the green, I'm not so sure, I think it might have been that the skirt darts were actually horizontal, and are hidden behind the bands, instead of the usual vertical darts. There are no darts at all in the skirt back, just a wide back yoke that meets up (or almost meets up, depending on which side of my skirt you're on) with the front bands.

So I guess doing these two skirts isn't really repeating myself - they really don't have much in common, except that they fit and I like them.

Mini Wardrobe Contest

Like I don't have enough on my plate. But I'm closing in on the end of the jacket, and it really does need some friends . . .

Nuts to You

Posting my to-do list here certainly seems to provide me with the kick in the pants I sometimes need. Out of the 5 pieces I recently posted, I've finished both dresses, and I just finished sewing the buttons on Butterick 4985, which is made from some of the oldest fabric in my stash. Actually, it's inherited grandmom stash, so that tells you it's getting up there.

I've posted a closeup of the fabric so you can see the print better - it's got the words hickory, oak, pecan, walnut, chestnut on it, with pictures of the nuts and leaves. How cool is that? While the colors - gray, red and purple - aren't my usual colors, I'm justifying wearing this because there are orange and green leaves interspersed with the others. Close enough, right?

I think the fabric is from the 1950s, but I can't be sure. My grandmom (actually my great-grandmom) died when I was 8, my mom took her stash, and I squirreled away this print before I hit my teens. It's been traveling with me ever since, waiting for the right project. Which this was, I think. Normally I'm not a puffed-sleeve kind of girl (see my comments on the BWOF dress earlier this week), but in this case, it worked with the fabric. And I have enough left over to make a matching skirt, which would turn this into a cute two-piece summer outfit.

Since I managed to finish all my pieces for the PR Wardrobe Contest, I'm debating if I want to enter the Mini-Wardrobe as well. I've been cleaning out my closets and drawers and getting rid of all the RTW that doesn't fit as well as it used to - or as well as what I make myself - and there are definite gaps in my wardrobe.

The rules for the Mini-Wardrobe are either 2 bottoms and 2 tops; 1 bottom and 3 tops; or 1 bottom, 1 dress and 2 tops. In all cases, 1 of the tops can be a jacket.

This would be an excuse for me to use the nice dark gray bottom-weight fabric that's been on the shelf and which didn't fit into the Wardrobe Contest entry. I certainly have other fabrics that would coordinate with it (offhand I can think of a light-and-dark gray stripe jersey that has a yen to be a BWOF top from last year) and most of those would also coordinate with the official wardrobe pieces. Yay! Just not sure if I want to do the extra top or a jacket. I have a few days before May - I'll sleep on it.