Some sewing, no FOs...

Well, I've been dragging my heels a bit on the Jalie tshirt front. I decided to make the wearable muslin have a bias-bound slash neck, but it's going to be a bit of a faff, so I haven't gone any further with it. I want to twin-needle topstitch the lavender silk-blend version, and haven't made it to Berwick Street for a needle, so haven't started on that one either. I do really like the slightly barmy pink/white/black/fuchsia print of the wearable muslin, so I'm sure when I actually knuckle down and do the bias binding I will kick myself for not doing it sooner.

In the meantime, I have made a muslin of View C (the skirt) from Butterick 5335. Unfortunately, this is a fugly skirt. It doesn't help that I am neither as tall nor as willowy as the lady in the drawing, but more to the point, the skirt is just not like the skirt in the picture. See, to me, that looks like a skirt with some gathering at the seam joining the yoke to the main part of the skirt, and then actual flare in the side seams of the skirt, continuing into the contrast band. In fact, it's a straight-sided rectangular piece with an identical-width (but shorter, obviously) band attached. So essentially any 'flare' is provided solely by the gathering, meaning that the skirt is basically the same sort of shape as the top of a Christmas cracker. It's a shame, because I think that the skirt in the picture is lovely (though I'd probably have to leave off the contrast band either way).

I have flitted, ADD-ishly, on to my next thing, skirt 405 from the current Burda Plus magazine, a nice, simple pencil skirt with 'princess seams' (I suppose?). I've traced the pieces (using Fabri-Baste, my new Favourite Thing) and was planning to cut it out of a nice navy cotton today, except I fell asleep. Oops. So I will hopefully get a chance to do that on Wednesday or Thursday, and who knows, I might even sew it up!

I can't decide whether to line it or not, my main reason for doing so, if I'm honest, would be that it'd make hemming invisibly a lot more likely - I don't really want to topstitch as it would interfere with the nice vertical seams, and I'm rubbish at invisible hemming on smooth/plain fabrics. I suppose it would also make finishing the back split/s easier (the pattern has one split, but seeing as it has two side-back seams, I may as well have two splits, which I rather like anyway). If I do line it, I'll use some nice strangely-dyed-and-thus-ridiculously-cheap silk lining material from Goldhawk Road, at around 1m of each fabric the skirt should still come in well under a tenner (well, if I don't include the cost of the Burda Plus, anyway) including zip etc. Not bad for a silk lined cotton skirt, really.