Admitting Defeat

You remember Scrappy Chevrons, right? How excited I was to finally have the enormous top finished! But I have hit a wall with it...

This is where I am today. I tried to do some simple FMQ loops with is. I love the texture it gives and really wanted that for this quilt. But it turns out that free motion quilting a queen sized quilt is really, really not going to happen on my machine. It hurt my arms too much, my stitches were extremely uneven because it was so hard to muscle all that bulk around. And really, toward the middle of the quilt I could hardly fit the bulk through the throat space, let alone with room for one of my arms to keep maneuvering.

So. Lesson learned. I spent a good 3 hours on this and only got about 1/8 of the way finished. There was no way I was going to go through another 21 hours of that torture! So I am ripping it all out and will be going with some nice straight lines instead. And starting to save for a machine with much more ample throat space!

I'm linking up to Sewjo Saturday over at My Go-Go Life! Mostly to cheer me up about having to rip out all my quilting by looking at the other pretty projects people have been working on.

Skirt Success and Skirt Fail

HI.

It's been a week. I'm terrible. But to be fair, I really haven't got a lot of sewing done this week. I don't know why, really. I just didn't feel much like sewing. I am going to blame the Events of Last Weekend. That sounds ominous, but really it was just some sewing mishaps...

First, the happy bit! I made another skirt :) AND actually used a Pinterest pin! What! Here is the result:

It is a gathered high-waisted skirt. It poofs rather nicely. I am a little sad that I didn't read the directions carefully enough to realize the zipper would end up on the side instead of the back, but really, I should have known that. I made this in a couple of hours Saturday morning and it was GREAT.

So then later, possibly still riding that "I made a skirt and it's awesome" high, I decided to make another. I bought this brown argyle fabric online, not realizing it would be so sheer in person. My plan was to make a super awesome pencil skirt for work. But a sheer pencil skirt? No way that would work. So I revised my plan to be a high-low hem skirt. The sheer, flowy fabric would be the pretty outside and I would use some plain beige fabric for a lining. Simple, right?

I got the idea from Pinterest, but I couldn't find the pin again (I know... that's what Pinterest is for). So I decided I remembered enough about it that I could wing it. I knew it was high-waisted and that it used elastic. After the successes of the morning, I figured I was a pro (that may have been the wine talking). So! I set to work!

After several hours and numerous oversights and screw ups, this is where my skirt was:

Thrown unceremoniously on my cutting table after picking out a lot of stitches...

The first thing that went horribly wrong (and probably when I should have realized my brain wasn't in a math or logic kind of place and maaaaybe should have called it a night) was that I cut the lining as a tube... a tube the size of my waist. Now, I don't know about you, but my hips and butt are way bigger than my waist. SO. That turned to scrap.

Next, I cut the lining so it would fit over my butt and thought, "SUCCESS! Now the rest of the skirt will come together with ease!" But, alas, it was not to be. The next stupid thing I did was sew the outside to the lining without leaving any space for a casing for the elastic...

See? Doesn't look so bad, but where will the elastic go?! AHHH! So then, even more stupidly, I tried to just fold over the top a couple of times to make the casing. MISTAKE. It not only looked horrible, but... the skirt wouldn't come on over my butt! AHHH! Again with the maths and the logics! Of course cutting the top of the skirt to fit my waist and then adding elastic wouldn't work unless maybe the fabric was super stretchy (which it isn't at all). 

I see all the stupid things I did wrong and have a pretty good idea how to avoid doing it again... But man, what a frustration. So, I threw it down on the table and rage quit my sewing room. I have been playing with yarn ever since. But I think I may be ready to give it another shot with two important modifications. 1. A different fabric for the lining. The one I chose is stiff and heavy and if I really was the waist to be elastic, that's going to have to go. And 2. I don't remember what this was going to be. Really. I just wrote that sentence about a minute ago and I already forgot what the second modification was going to be. See why I have trouble??

I am dedicating this post to Audrey of Hot Pink Quilts because she said I make skirt-making look easy ;) It isn't always easy. I just don't always tell you when I insert the elastic waistband and it ends up super twisted or when my skirt ends up so short it barely covers my butt or when I sew a zipper on backwards (true story...). Not to discourage anyone from making a skirt! As clothing goes, skirts aren't too bad to make, really. I just advise you to start with a PLAN. Have all your measurements written out or have a pattern ready to go... at the very least, don't make a tube the diameter of your waist and expect it to go over your butt ;)

Anyway. This is my one and only finish for the week  so I'll be linking up to Crazy Mom Quilts. Hopefully next week will be more successfull and sewing-full. If not, there will be lots of pictures of yarn :D