Ciao dearest Needlwork friends - I've had an intensive period of sewing this week, as I was travelling by train to the north of the country (Italy) and spent a lot of the journey - and the 5 days away there - stitching away.

I worked on multiple garments, but this skirt was my absolute joy and pride in finishing! It was made - intuitively and spontaneously - from a beautiful red cross-stitched vintage linen tablecloth, which I bought for a couple of euros at the market.

I'd been looking at it and 'draping' it - or at least, folding it around myself a bit: I could see immediately that if I folded it in half, and then folded it in on itself, I could keep the full red stitched element visible, and make the skirt roughly the size of my waist...

These first snaps are the finished skirt as I wore it out for the first time; it still needs a bit of cleaning (it seemed to have been a well-loved and well-used tablecloth!) and a slight adjustment to the front of it, where I curved it outwards a bit much when I made the side seams...

... which turned into the front seams, as the visual of the beautiful cross-stich was better viewed that way. So the curve which might have been on my hips doesn't sit so well at the front, though my belly has still been round from my baby weight when I was pregnant (my gestation completed early).

So I worked on simpler things whilst on the journey up to Venezia, as I needed to see the whole fabirc laid out, to get a feel of how to construct it. Again, I never use a pattern, and am embarked on this Year Of Mastery In Sewing, to get more expertise by doing.

Here I am ensconsed into the living room of the apartment I was staying in: the family had multiple screens activated all at the same time, and there was no-where to be in a quiet reflective situation! This was pretty excrutiating for me, as a highly sensitive sentient being! I got a major headache at least one day...

But sewing helped a lot with this: though I was being interrupted quite consistently by the man of the house, who wanted my opinion on what was unfolding on-screen (which I evidently was not paying attention to, nor interested in, because I was immersed in my sewing!); it was a powerful exercise in concentration - and in coming back to focus, when being distracted multiple times!

I hummed and hawed over keeping the border and incorporating it into the structure in a decorative way, but finally decided to keep it simple, as the cross-stitching is already quite impactful.

One idea was to just hem the border over to the front, then use some kind of ribbon or binding material, in red, to fill the space behind the lacey detail: giving a nice and unique border with dimension.

But I cut it off completely, and kept the hems clean: I am learning to edit well, as I make my first more-professional garments - not to over-decorate or -imbellish. Iused the cut-off borders as waistband, and also as a reinforcement material for a favourite shopping bag, which I was using as my travelling sewing bag, and realised the straps were almost breaking (I've had it for decades).

This is it being roughly laid in place, to get an idea of whether or not it is going to be the right dimensions.

My favourite activity whilst on 'holiday': hemming the quite large lower border of the skirt, as it was taking shape.

The long lines of stitching for hems were fabulous recreation time for me - I tacked it in red first, and actually double stitched in some places. I didn't have access to a machine whilst travelling, and was enjoying immensely the simple pleasure of crafting my stitches as neatly as physically possible - getting better with each stretch of the borders.

Then I began working on the overall structure:

This is the finishing of the waistband, which you can see I began, above; I doubled the border strip, sewing it inside on the top edge and folding it over, then fixing it to either side of the main skirt, to hide any attaching rough seams inside and out of the skirt. I had to cut away some thick extra layers of fabric, where I'd overlapped the top of the skirt for the big pleats, but that worked out fine once I ironed it in the end.

The wasitband I'd measured roughly by putting it around my waist: I wanted the skirt to sit high up, and not on the hips as is the norm these days; I dislike intensely, unless it is summer and I was a cool belly, having my clothes sit on hips and cutting across belly-button, rather than sitting above the hips. When they sit above the hips, we don't need to have them strongly grasping the body or using too-tight elastic: the hips hold them effortlessly. This is a big part of my redesigning clothes FOR ME and not for how others might want to make them!

These are all the layers I had to slim down to fit inside of the waistband!

This is a final shot, once I was back home and could do a proper test session: to show you how the structure works - and how thin the final skirt was - I am working on a lining for it, to keep it modest!

This is when it was mostly taken-shape, and I had to work on the zip - which it seems I didn't document - likely because it demanded intense concentration!

I was pretty pleased with how it sat, the first time I tried it on!

And here you can just see the zip: it is red, and the edges are a wee bit rippling - I have to master how to not have that happen: I think it's related to my concentrating so hard to get the zip aligned! Also, because the fabric is very soft and it was quite hard to keep it from moving, during such a fiddley operation.

A final shot of the completed skirt! I wore it to market on Sunday, yesterday, and it felt really lovely - I'd made a mocked-up underskirt for it, but it wasn't perfectly how I wanted it, and didn't sit as well as hoped. I am taking the old lining out of a skirt that I bought to take apart, which I think will fit really well. I'll fix it into the side seams too, to make sure it doesn't ride up.

I hope you enjoy your sewing today and this coming week - thanks for popping by my post, and do upvote and share, tip and send virtual hugs, if it inspires you to do so!

Love!

www.claregaiasophia.com