To begin my sewing journey, I made myself a little sewing kit, by which I mean I gathered up all the various sewing tools and supplies I have collected so far and repurposed a cheap, tacky purse I got at a thrift store to hold them.
I imagine it will grow as my needs expand, but this is sufficient for now. At least until I get Mom's sewing machine.
I made the waistband for the skirt by backstitching together two long pieces of the silk with approximately a 5/8" seam allowance. I measured it to go around my hips, because I prefer things to fit there rather than around my true waist. Gertie recommends you interface one side of it, which is an unseen inner layer that gives body to the piece that the outer fabric alone would not confer. I didn't have real interfacing and didn't feel like making a special trip for it, so I used some leftover white muslin I had lying around. Not going to add a lot of stiffness, but I'm okay with that. That was stitched to the wrong side (or the side you won't see) of one of the waistband pieces, then the right sides (or the sides you will see) of both waistband pieces were pressed together and sewn up on three sides. Then I turned it inside out so that the right sides faced outward. This is what it currently looks like; you can see the white muslin interfacing peeking out of the one long side that isn't sewn yet.
It still needs to be pressed, but I haven't gotten to that yet.
Next I went back to the skirt itself. I already sewed up one side, but Gertie said to go on to making the gathers along the top. Now, she assumes you already know how to make gathers, which I didn't, so I had to look it up. I discovered the suggestion to make two long rows of basting (a loose in-and-out stitch often meant to temporarily hold things together until you can put in a more secure stitch, which will enable it to be removed) around the top of the skirt. I also learned to divide the skirt into quadrants with pins so that they can be matched with corresponding pins in a similarly divided waistband, to ensure even placement of the gathers when you sew them all together. Because I don't have a machine yet, I am handsewing, and the longer a thread gets, the more likely it is to tangle and become useless, so I decided to divide the skirt up now and do a separate pair of basting stitches in each quadarant in order to keep the thread length down. Here is how my hand-basting turned out:
It's tough to see the very closely matching thread against the fabric, but they mostly turned out straight. Now here is what the skirt looked like when I started to pull the rows of strings to put the gathers in.
The gathers aren't pretty or even yet, but this was mostly to test and see if my four separate gather rows might work. I know that's not an orthodox method, but it looks like it will.
So that's what I've done so far. The next steps will be pressing the waistband, and then sewing the skirt up into it. Not quite sure how that will work, I think it will involve attaching it to just the interfacing so it doesn't show on the fashion fabric, but I'm not certain. I will have to refer back to my instructions. But I'll take more pictures once I progress.
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