Please excuse the teeny-tiny picture – this photo is from 2007, when my digital camera apparently had fewer pixels than my phone does now!
This was my very favourite skirt for years and years, and I wore it until the elastic gave out and the fabric went very thin indeed. I called this a “stealth goth” skirt, because it looked so colourful and pretty from a distance that it usually took people a long time to notice that the design was actually skulls!
This one was a very close run second – and I think the first skirt that I ever made from an old duvet cover. The print is space travel, and features carefully labelled astronauts, space craft and planets.
The reason I stopped making these skirts is that the frilled elastic I used for the waistbands has been discontinued. There is a similar one now available, but it isn’t as soft, and it’s three times more expensive, which adds quite a lot onto the cost of the finished skirt. I’m still thinking about whether that’s going to be a viable option for the future. I’ve been using up the last few little elastic scraps to make skirts for my niece, but I’ve very nearly run out altogether.
The other nice thing about making skirts for my niece is that I can use licensed fabrics, which I don’t do for eternal magpie unless the customer supplies them to me.
(There’s a huge grey area about what you can and can’t make with licensed character fabrics, particularly now that Star Wars belongs to Disney, who are very hot on preventing infringement.)
I’d originally bought this fabric – which glows in the dark! – to make a dress for my niece and a pair of pyjamas for my husband. Then my niece decided that she’d rather have a skirt, and my husband decided that glow in the dark pyjamas might be a bit disturbing… so I find myself with quite a large piece left over. I know it’s silly, but I have to confess that the temptation to buy some bright orange lining and made myself a ridiculous Hallowe’en dress is extremely strong right now.