Moving Day

Thimble & Cork has its very own website now!

Head on over to www.thimbleandcork.com to see the updated blog and check back there for future posts.

In the Works: Sonja Dress

Indecisiveness is one of my great flaws…but I’ve come to embrace it.  I was supposed to start working on the re-make of my leather pleated mini skirt this weekend.  But I’m having trouble finding good material for it.  All of the faux-leather I've found is either thick upholstery fabric or is very shiny and looks like costume fabric.  I'm still on the hunt!

In the meantime, I happened upon this free pattern from BurdaStyle – and it’s exactly what I had in mind for my blue skater dress!  No pattern drafting necessary!  Hooray!



Sonja Dress by  ElisaSalmePatterns



Unfortunately, I was under the weather most of the weekend and didn’t get much done, but I have started my muslin for the skater dress and hope to finish it this week.  It is a very simple pattern so it really shouldn’t take long at all.  I definitely want to do a muslin first – with a bodice that fitted I’m sure there will need to be some adjustments made here and there.

Pleather skirt will have to wait another week…

Too Many Ideas, Too Little Time

I am at a sewing standstill.  This happens far too often…I get excited about an idea, then I get excited about another idea and another...and I end up with a stack of UFO's needing to be completed.  My brain works much faster than my needle!

I was planning on re-making the leather pleated skirt in better fabric while it's fresh on my mind.  But before I could get to the fabric store to find more leather material, a delivery showed up on my doorstep - from Mood!!!  It was a beautiful navy blue silk that I purchased when it went on sale recently.

Now I'm dying to make a dress with that silk, and I keep coming back to the Colette Peony pattern that I've had in my stash for a while and have been waiting to make. 



www.colettepatterns.com

But I'm also obsessed with the idea of making a skater dress - very fitted in the bodice and a 1/2 or 3/4 circle skirt.  Full skirts are my weakness!

www.asos.com

 

www.asos.com


 

www.asos.com

At moments like this, I'm tempted to whip something up quickly just so I can move on to the next idea.  I know that I could make that pleated skirt in an afternoon, the skater dress in a day, but they would be sloppy.  They wouldn’t fit perfectly.  They probably wouldn’t even be lined. 

One thing that I’ve learned (time and time again) is that if I don’t take the time to do it right, I just won’t wear it.  That means I have to slow down, and I'm not a fan of slowing down.  But I will.  

After all, I have to keep my New Year's Resolutions in mind:

*Goal #8: Make a wearable wardrobe

*Goal #10: Take time to improve my finishings

Ok, game plan: I will make the skirt first.  It will be the quickest of my projects, and I won’t really be able to say that UFO #2 is finished until I re-make it.  Then I’ll move on to that silk…maybe I’ll even make the skater dress out of the silk and kill two birds with one stone!

With Every Mistake, A Lesson Learned

The pleated leather skirt is finally finished. 

When I started this blog, I vowed to document all of my projects – my successes and my failures.  This skirt certainly falls within the second category.

Where to start?  Compliment before critique right?  Ok, let’s start with what I actually liked about this project.

I LOVE the design!  The pleats turned out beautifully and give the skirt a gorgeous shape.  And let’s not forget that I learned a new pleating technique to produce those perfectly uniform little folds.  (Checking off Sewing Goal #3 for the month!)

Another perk is that I’ve realized once I re-make the skirt in a better fabric, I will actually wear it!  It sounds obvious, but I often become obsessed with fashion ideas that I’m never able to incorporate into my daily life.  I assumed this would be one of those wasted efforts.  But this skirt is fun, flirty, slightly edgy – just my style!

So, just what makes this such an epic failure?  The fabric. 

Everything that is wrong with this skirt comes down to the fact that I used a horrible fabric.  To be fair, I knew that this material was a long shot, but I let the clearance price fool me into believing I could make it work.  (Lesson learned – no matter how inexpensive, bad fabric will always be a waste of time!!)

Once I started pleating, I realized that the material was just too thick and stiff to work.  The skirt literally stands on its own!   While the rigidity makes for cute pictures, the first time I tried to sit down, it would probably stick straight up like an old-fashioned hoop skirt.  Not exactly the look one wants to achieve in a mini!

Although the actual finished product was a bust, I appreciate the experience that I gained by making this skirt.  Besides the new pleating technique, I improved on my waistband construction, and I have a great new skirt design that I can’t wait to use again!