Double Layer Twirly Skirt

For a few days now I have had shirring on my mind... but I had an idea to do vertical shirring rather than the usual horizontal shirring. My vision was for a double layered skirt with the top layer being given a scalloped kind of appearance through the use of spaced vertical rows of elastic thread.

Here's the result... not 100% what my mind was envisioning but not too far off it!

And now, if you think it's worthy of recreation... here's the how to (bearing in mind once again that I'm still a bit of a newbie to the whole tutorial thing - I am trying to cut down the length of the tutorial to hopefully be a bit more to the point):

Now for a basic guide to a skirt I used the fabulous tutorial 'lazy days skirt' found at Oliver + S. I just adapted it somewhat as I wanted two layers.

Firstly, I cut my fabric for the skirt body (as detailed in the lazy days skirt pattern I used the width of the fabric from selvage to selvage and cut the desired length plus 2"). For my two layers I cut one of the spotty material and one of the floral exactly the same. The other portion of floral fabric I used to make some bias tape. (Another fabulous tutorial on making your own bias tape can be found here at Prudent Baby)

Using my over locker I serged the two skirt pieces together at the top both with right sides facing up.

I then folded, pressed and top stitched the bottom hem of the outer floral layer (two folds so that the raw edge of the material is hidden in the hem). 

At this stage the fabric is still one open piece of two layers. I then used a disappearing fabric pen to mark where I wanted the shirring. For this skirt I decided to have two vertical rows of shirring approximately 6" apart running from the outer layers hemline to about 2/3 of the way up towards the waist. It was a little bit of a guesstimate really as to how much or long to do the shirring because I wasn't sure how much it would pull the top layer up.

Now I wanted to join the side seam of the top layer only. To do this I flipped the top layer inside out whilst leaving the under layer facing right side up. I serged the floral fabric together being sure not to go onto the under layer.

Then I did the same with the under layer by flipping the top floral layer to be right side up whilst the spotty underskirt was wrong side up and right sides together (does that make sense??) and serged the side seam.

I then hemmed the spotty under layer with the bias tape I made to co-ordinate with the floral fabric.

I then folded over and pressed the top edge of the skirt in order to create the casing tube for the elastic waist band. The width of your elastic will determine the depth of the fold. Sew the casing ensuring you leave an opening big enough to feed the elastic into and through.

Once you have fed the elastic through and stitched it together and closed the opening you are pretty much done. You might find that you need to just give the elastic shirring a couple of bursts of steam with the iron to get it to scrunch up a bit more.

Ta Daa!! Done... yep... you guessed it... time for a victory dance!

As usual, its late as the only time I really get to sew uninterrupted is when my lovely girls are asleep, which means you'll have to come back later to see my Big Little Miss M strutting her stuff in this little number... I might just add a couple of embellishments to the skirt and maybe jazz up a matching t-shirt!

Things I would do different next time:

I think I would make the underskirt just a little shorter as I kind of imagined it just peeking out rather than being quite as exposed as this one. But all in all I am quite happy with the end result and I think it would look better if the waistband was actually done in the under skirt material to give it a little more contrast.

Like it? Let me know... I love getting some feedback and if my instructions are not all that clear let me know about it so I can try to improve them... otherwise Cheers for now & come visit again soon to see what I'm up to!



Oh, and don't forget to check out some of the awesome links on my side bar to some absolutely fabulous link parties :)