Purple maxi skirt

One of the reasons I thought learning to sew would be such a good idea is because at five foot nothing, trying to get jeans and skirts at the right length is incredibly challenging!  I usually find that long skirts completely drown me - although on the bright side, a skirt that would be too short on a tall girl is usually knee length and completely decent on me!  The thing that I imagined a sewing machine would be most useful for was taking up jeans (something which I haven't actually got round to doing yet!).  What I didn't imagine was that I would find fantastic tutorials online that would inspire me to actually try my hand at making a skirt myself!

So here it is - the first skirt I've ever made.  Modelled in our back garden, with my husband as the expert photographer...

I really hadn't realise, until I cruised around Pinterest, that there were so many easy tutorials to follow for skirts that I would just love to make.  The tutorial for this skirt came from Sew much ado, and was so simple to follow.  I found some lovely purple jersey fabric in Calico, my local fabric shop here in Bristol, and I was ready for action!

A few new skills that I learnt:

• French seams: these weren't actually in the original tutorial, but I had read about them in my few basic sewing books, and I thought would it would be good to put them along the side seams of my skirt - I'm inclined to be a bit rough with my clothes, so it never hurts to have an extra bit bit of strength!

French seam

• Working with jersey fabric - this was challenging as each layer had an extra 10 inches, so you had to stretch the small piece to fit into the larger one, and then sew them together.  I used a zig zag stitch to do this - it just gave the seam more strength. 

There are plenty of imperfections, but for a first attempt, I was really pleased.  I've now worn it a number of times, and it's a perfect length - exactly what I wanted!