Feather and Fan

I’m safely in California now, and at long last a few rows into the edging for the wedding shawl. I decided on the Wave Edging with a bit of faggoting between it and the body of the shawl.

This last weekend, I made it through Rahul’s cousin’s wedding, an intense, three-day party, full of dancing, drinking, and delicious food, for hundreds of friends and relatives.

After the wedding, Rahul and I and a couple of his cousins were asked to help clean up the altar. Most of the stuff went into a big trash bag or a box to take back up to the bride’s family’s rooms. However, we came across one problematic item–a big bowl full of ghee (clarified butter) that had been used during the ceremony as an offering to Agni, the fire god. The priest had been dipping a wooden stick of questionable (but surely very holy) origin into it the whole time, so we thought we shouldn’t put it back into the jar. However, also, apparently, at this point, the ghee was special or blessed or something and should not be thrown away. (Plus, I knew from my parents’ work at Three Stone Hearth that it was really awfully expensive to make that much ghee, and I couldn’t bear to put it in the trash.)

So, as we gathered up betel nuts and flowers from the altar, We handed the ghee to Rahul to dispose of somehow. Afterwards, we went out into the hallway outside the hotel’s banquet hall and found this sitting on a table (his head got a little bit cut off, but that is Ganesh, you can tell by the rat he’s sitting on.)

Free Ghee

Leaving for Toledo today, California on Sunday. I may or may not be posting while I’m gone over the next 2 1/2 weeks or so. Any suggestions for good yarn shops to visit? I have no idea if I will actually have any time for such things–I’m not going to be in the Bay Area for a decent chunk of that time due to the wedding, and there are plenty of other things I want to do while I am in the Bay Area, but just in case. I know there’s a new one in Albany called k2tog, and I am always interested in visits to Artfibers, Imagiknit, Article Pract, Stonemountain and Daughter, Lacis, and Stash Yarns, but I’ve been to all of those except k2tog already.

Project list (I certainly won’t knit up all of it; it sounds like a lot, but there will be many hours in the car and airport/airplanes, and I expect many hours of downtime, too, so I should be able to make pretty good progress on something else once the shawl is out of the way):

• Loquat Shawl and extra yarn to finish it
• Barbara Walker Volume 2 and The Lacy Knitting of Mary Schiffmann (a slim volume I found at the library with a number of nice charted patterns, including several edging patterns I might try, and a non-charted but very exciting peacock doily akin to, though not exactly the same as, this one) to help me figure out how to finish the shawl
• My skein of turquoise llama yarn, since I should be seeing Molly in CA and am hoping I can finish something for her before I do
• Yarn and needles for the Tangled Yoke Cardigan (lots of stockinette!)
• My skein of Sundara Sock in Arabian Nights to at least start swatching for a lace scarf

Here’s the last new dress finished before going on vacation. It’s super comfy, if not especially flattering (the fabric reminds me, now that the dress is finished, of pajamas).

It’s a nod to my favorite Magritte painting, The Empire of Light/L’empire des lumières–dark clouds below, blue sky above, business in the front, party in the back. I might make a bird applique out of the remaining sunny sky fabric, and make it a La grande famille dress.

Pattern: Titus Summer Blouse. I’ve sewed this twice before–once in orange cotton, and once in an adorable Japanese bunny print (I keep forgetting to blog this one). A nice, simple pattern.

Fabric: Bears Just Wanna Have Fun, minus the bears… 1 yard of dark sky, .25 yards of sunny sky; .25 yards of some random white cotton fabric to line the yoke

Mods:

• Cut the outer edges of the yoke about 1/2 wider because I didn’t have enough fabric for sleeves.
• Lined the yoke with contrast material because I ran out of the sunny sky fabric.
• Instead of cutting the bodice pieces as shown in the pattern, I sewed the entire yard of dark sky fabric into a tube, laid it flat with the seam at the back, then used the corner of the pattern to cut out armholes on either side. I gathered it to the width of the new yoke and sewed them together, then hemmed to the appropriate length with a double-fold hem.
• Since I left the sleeves off, I turned the outer edges of the yoke to the inside about 1/4 inch, pressed them, and topstitched them together, sandwiching the raw edges inside the yoke. For the underarm parts of the armholes, I just turned the fabric under and stitched it in place–didn’t clip the curves or anything.
• I gave it an empire (ha ha) waist by cutting the elastic Hanes Her way waistband out of some disintegrating underwear, pinning it to the inside of the tube, under the bustline (stretching the elastic out to the width of the fabric as I pinned) and then sewing 3 lines of stitches to secure it in place. I stretched the elastic out as I went and removed the pins one by one as I came to them to keep everything in the right place. I didn’t put enough pins in the first time, actually, so I had to do this twice after winding up with almost no gathers on one side and a giant avant-garde mass of drooping gathered cloth on the other.

Rahul’s verdict on this dress: “it looks like felt.”

The latest and greatest on the Loquat shawl:

I’m having some doubt on the edging pattern. I was thinking of using this one (Classic Bead Edging from Barbara Walker), with that top garter strip changed to faggoting to match the pattern in the main part of the shawl, but maybe it looks too bumpy, too open/uneven in contrast to the stockinette triangles in the Honeybee lace. The swatch below has been blocked, by the way. What do you think? The Wave Edging used in the Print o’ the Wave stole might be nice–it’s one of my favorite edgings of all–but I was worrying that it might be too small-scale to work with this shawl and might not be stretchy enough to bind off the faggoting stitches, which are very wide. I’ll make a swatch tonight if I have time… otherwise, BW vol.2 is coming with me on my trip to Toledo.

Perhaps I shouldn’t do the sideways edging, but extend the pattern downwards (I was thinking of using a variation on the Razor Shell pattern in order to make scallops). Full of doubt now, as that part of the shawl gets closer…

Anyway, it’s a good 42 inches across the top, now, stretched out. I knit a bunch on it last night and finished Fitcher’s Brides (it’s based on the Bluebeard fairy tale, so perhaps was not a great book to be reading as I was knitting a wedding shawl… I will have to find a “happily ever after” book to read to counteract it. Bridget Jones’s Diary, maybe.)

It actually goes over the shoulders now (I will have more to say later about the cloud dress you can see me wearing):

Here are details of the mini-cables leading into the honeybee lace at the 4 increase points on the shawl. They twist in opposite directions on the two sides of the shawl.

Stretched out, the shawl reminds me of a big, yellow, pretty, lacy, manta ray:

I am almost comically tired and stressed out from work and wedding/trip prep: I’m attending two weddings in the next week, I don’t know if I mentioned that, but the first one is in Toledo this Saturday, and I will be driven to the Indianapolis airport on the way back from that wedding so I can catch my flight to California for the second one, the one in which I will be a bridesmaid. This afternoon, while I was in the midst of my work day and feeling very busy indeed, we discovered that I thought we were leaving on Friday morning, and Rahul thought we were leaving on Thursday morning, and his parents were coming to pick us up for this wedding a day earlier than I had planned.

So I had to take an additional day off work, which I really hadn’t wanted to do, and then the rush project I spent my weekend slaving over suddenly blew up and became a mild disaster around 4 PM. So I spent the next 6 hours or so downloading new files, proofreading, copy-pasting, generally trying not to have a nervous breakdown. Gah. Rahul got me out of the house around 10 PM and because the comedy show we were trying to go to was sold out, we ended up having a relaxing white trash trip to White Castle, Wal-Mart, and the gas station, and the surprising thing is it actually seemed to help me unwind. I think that must say loads about how shitty my day was up until that point. I got a new pair of pantyhose (no runs!) and these patterns, in anticipation of more relaxing days: Simplicity/Built By Wendy 3835 and Simplicity 4077 (the latter totally inspired by Flintknits’s awesome series of Simplicity 4077 blouses). Say what you will about Wal-Mart, patterns are cheap there.

Aside from eating gluey burgers and wandering the aisles of the Megalomart, the good things from today are:

1) Purlescence is now carrying my patterns! And Robynn is going to be putting them together with yarns into luxe little kits. Her yarns are all delectable, so I’m really excited to see which yarns she ends up pairing with which patterns.

2) I got my order in from Knitpicks. (Um, my first order. Simply Shetland 4 came back in stock, and since it’s kind of hard to find it on Amazon, where I buy most of my books with my credit card rewards gift certificates, I decided to go ahead and get it since it’s 40% off, and I am dying to make Autumn Rose at some point. Wow, that was a long sentence. Although I sold two books this week, they have immediately been replaced with two more. Net destash: 0.)

In today’s package, I got some Options needles, yay!–so I’ve transferred my Loquat Shawl to a needle that’s actually long enough that I can stretch it out to see its real size–just about 40 inches wingspan at the moment. (Should I be panicking yet? I have enough time, technically, to finish it before the wedding, since I have approximately 8 hours of airplane time, 15 hours of time in the car, and an unspecified, hellish number of hours in the airport between now and then, without even counting days once I get to California, before the wedding… but it will also need to be blocked before Sarah can wear it.) I also got New Pathways for Sock Knitters, which looks fascinating even though I don’t really knit socks (yet). I figured it would be a book with lasting value. Perhaps I’ll take it along with a skein or two of sock yarn as vacation knitting, and make a pair of socks once I’m done with the shawl. I’ve made a lot of sweaters over the course of my knitting life, but only one and a half socks (1.5 socks, not 1.5 pairs). And four pairs of felted slippers, which should count for something.

3) I’m going to knit a row of the shawl and then go to bed and read Fitcher’s Brides for a while. I hope I can finish it before I have to return it to the library.

Bolstered by the success of my first Infinity Dress, I have gone on a huge sewing and fabric-buying rampage lately. (Apologies in advance for the quality of the photos in this post. They almost all came out very bright and overexposed. Just pretend it’s a halo of heavenly light and I am about to ascend into a hovering spacecraft, and you are an exclusive witness to this special moment.)

First, Rahul and I biked out to Wal-Mart the other day–a harrowing 4.5 mile ride along narrow, busy roads, on the west side of town, across a freeway. My bike nearly fell in a ditch and when I corrected to stay out of it, I nearly got hit by a truck. It was scary. But my reward was 4 yards of 1×1 ribbed black knit fabric for only $1 a yard. I went home and made another Infinity Dress, and then made a drape neck top with the leftovers. Because my fabric was only 45 inches wide, I made a gathered skirt instead of a circle skirt, so this one has a slimmer silhouette.

I also accidentally sewed the band on top of the straps instead of underneath, but I think it’s still OK.

Here’s the drape neck top. It is sewn together rather poorly. The rib knit was much stretchier than the jersey, so I ended up with a lot of lettuce edges where there shouldn’t have been any. The pattern is Simplicity New Look 6470, View B.

Here’s the new dress.

“Oh my god, that looks SO WEIRD,” said Rahul this morning, as I was going out to water my basil plants on the balcony, and took this picture of the back of the dress to demonstrate how weird it was that my dress had no back. I thought it looked fine, but the sleeves fell off when I was bent over my plants, so I retied it to cross over in the back.

Because the skirt has a pretty slim silhouette, I just wore it underneath my next two FOs instead of changing into a new top.

These are both made with quilting cotton I bought a while back at Shiisa Quilts, from their $4.99 bed sale.

This one is made with a dark purple fabric printed with white dragonflies. I made it into a circle skirt with ties and a zipper at the waist. Because I only had about a yard of 45″ fabric, it came out shorter than I would have liked and the overall silhouette is a little bit 80’s. A learning experience. I should have stuck with a plain A-line wrap skirt like I had originally planned.

This one I’m very proud of. The fabric is a Rowan/Westminster Martha Negley cotton, dark red, striped with tree trunks. I drafted my own pattern according to the A-line skirt, fitted waist directions in Sew What! Skirts, an excellent book for the beginning skirt-sewer like myself–highly recommended. I went on to cut the pieces on the bias to make chevron stripes, put in side pockets (these need some work–for some reason, I cut them so the pockets don’t really dip down, just go straight in, so I can’t put anything in them, though I can use them to warm my hands) and installed what I think is an invisible zipper in the back. I just need to put in some snaps to secure the waistband.

After all that, I went to Jo-Ann and back to Shiisa Quilts, where they’ve dropped the price of the bed sale fabrics to $3.99 a yard and are having a buy one yard, get one yard free offer through today, so I scored a bunch of nice fabric for just $2 a yard.

Here’s some of what I got:

Cloud fabric (not on sale, but I loved it. This is Moda fabric, named, puzzlingly, “Bears just wanna have fun”)

Gray fabric with chartreuse hydrangeas, Kaffe Fassett Lille Arbour. I loved this fabric last time I was in the store, but Rahul prevented me from buying it with his protestations of how hideous it was. So I went back without him and bought several yards of it for half price. I think I might make the Anna Dress with it.

Some other stuff: from Shiisa, some blue Rowan Martha Negley fabric with green plums, some blue striped fabric, the aforementioned Kaffe Fassett fabric, and blue fabric with delicate geometric traceries–this is Free Spirit Mendhi Lotus, and is much drapier and silkier than the other fabrics. I haven’t decided what to do with any of this yet, though the default is “knee-length skirt.”

The linen print with brown embroidered flowers is from Jo-Ann (was also on sale) and is destined for another simple A-line skirt.

This is my new favorite summer dress. It was so fast and easy it hardly counts as an FO, since it’s essentially putting together a kit. I saw the fabric on sale at Jo-Ann and bought it on impulse: they sell a big roll of cotton gauze pre-smocked with elastic thread, and you just buy a piece a couple of inches larger than your bust size, sew a tube, add straps as desired, and hem it. I made nice wide straps to cover up bra straps and this dress fits perfectly, aside from the fact that I didn’t pre-shrink my fabric so I ended up with a dress an inch or two shorter than what I had wanted.

Edited to add, since I had some comments about this: if you’re in the US and don’t have a Jo-Ann Fabrics nearby, it looks like you can get pre-smocked fabric online via Hancock Fabrics. I couldn’t find this specific fabric on the Jo-Ann website, but when I was in the store they also had the same stuff in pink and green, and some tropical Hawaiian-looking smocked fabrics.

I also have some brown jersey (not shown) for yet another Infinity Dress and another try at that drape-neck top. All I can say is that it’s a good thing sewing is so much faster than knitting.

Speaking of which, here is the current progress on the Loquat Shawl:


Apparently, as maid of honor, I’m going to have to make a toast at this wedding, which fills me with a deep sense of terror and anxiety (I would rather eat bugs than do any kind of public speaking). If only they were traditionalists and left all the public speaking to the best man and all the fussy lady’s maid duties to the maid of honor. I’m sure I can carry bobby pins and straighten hairdos like nobody’s business.

I must soothe myself with admiring my newest yarn acquisition, the first shipment of the Sundara Seasons club, June 2008, the Autumn season. This is Sundara Sock yarn in Arabian Nights, a rich, warm brown shot through with henna highlights. Isn’t it gorgeous? I have a pattern idea in my head for this already, but can’t start anything new till I’m done with the shawl.

And a knitter’s PSA: Knit Picks is having their annual 40% off book sale, and they’ve just posted a bunch of new yarns for sale: delicious-looking semi-solid kettle dyes, new colors of many yarns, Imagination hand-painted sock yarn, Swish Bulky superwash, and more.

Here’s a little sneak peek at the current progress of the YELLOW! wedding shawl I’m making for my best friend. I could use some encouragement that yes, it looks pretty and is worth continuing on with… it’s a bit of a beast to work, as there is lace patterning on every row and due to the little minicable-and-lace increase pattern leading into each repeat of the honeybee-and-faggoting pattern, the chart is 46 rows long. Still, each individual bit of it is pretty intuitive, as long as I don’t get mixed up about which part of the pattern I’m working.

It’s a top-down triangle and I’ll finish it with a sideways knitted-on edging. I’m really loving the color and the yarn.

About two years ago, not long after moving to Bloomington, I was googling pure llama yarn with the intention of making a scarf for my friend Molly. We’ve known each other since I was five, and long ago, we wrote a parody of a romance novel together called “The Mark of the Llama.” Molly happens to be allergic to wool, so I thought it would be a great opportunity to sample some exotic fiber and also make her a nice little in-joke of a present.

This was before Mirasol Miski and Elsebeth Lavold Baby Llama came on the scene, so it was a little hard to find something suitable–most of what I was finding was wool-llama blends, like Cascade Pastaza. One of the first hits that came up when I searched for “100% llama yarn” was Yellow Wood Llamas (or maybe it was their web store, Farmhouse Fibers), run by Fred and Laura Keller. When I looked at their site, I noticed that they were located in Martinsville, just north of Bloomington, so I inquired about the possibility of coming up to their farm to pick up my purchase (and meet the llamas) rather than having it shipped down. Laura and I emailed back and forth for a while but never managed to get the dates worked out, and the idea fell by the wayside.

Well, recently, since Rahul finished his master’s, it dawned on me that Molly was probably finishing her graduate degree as well, so I’d better get cracking on that present for her. I contacted Laura again and we finally set up a date for llama-viewing.

Thus it was that last Friday, Kalani, Elli, and I spent a gorgeous summer evening driving up to Martinsville to hang out with a pack of large furry animals. I loved the visit so much, I think my new life plan involves owning a llama farm at some point. They have so much personality and charm, I love their gigantic golf-ball eyes and long eyelashes, and their fur is soft and silky as can be.

We went into the backyard, past their pond bordered with honeysuckle and yucca plants, and home to fish, snapping turtles, and pesky muskrats, and as we started up a hill towards the pasture, a little herd of llamas ran up to the fence to see what we were doing. (There are dozens more of them, but the males almost all live in on a separate plot of land across the road.) I thought that might be it–interaction across the fence–but no, they took us through the barn and into the midst of many friendly and curious llamas. Cooper (or perhaps his name was Hopper?), a seven-month-old male, was especially friendly and spent so much time breathing into our faces and giving us kisses and nibbles that Laura took him away and put a muzzle on him so we would have some breathing room. Here he is, getting in Kalani’s personal space:

Michele is their ambassador llama, an incredibly good-natured and friendly creature. We spent a lot of time giving her back scratches and cuddles. She was very fond of Elli.

This enclosure was home to all the outcast camelids. In the back we have Phantom, aka Paco, the lone alpaca in the herd. In the front, Lewis, the spunkiest, toughest little llama ever. This guy has had a very hard life–born blind, he later broke his leg very badly, had it set with pins and plates to hold it in place–and then the leg got infected, so he spent a lot of time at the OSU veterinary hospital being patched up and tended. You can read more of his saga on the Yellow Wood blog.

On this side of the barnyard was also a three-legged llama–I forgot his name, but he got tangled up trying to jump a fence when he was a baby, and injured his leg so badly it had to be amputated.

He seems pretty good-natured about it now, though.

Here are more gratuitous llama photos (and more here):

And if you click on the picture of Paco below, you’ll get to see a video of an adorable inter-species greeting:

So we spent a good long time showering attention on the llamas and asking all kinds of questions, then we stopped in the barn where we saw a pregnant barn kitty:

and Kalani got to feed a llama named Captain Curry, and then we went into the house, where we were confronted with a beautiful room full of yarn and fiber. I didn’t think to take a photo of the room-o-fiber, but you can see me wallowing in yarn in Kalani’s post.

Here’s what I got:
A 1.4 oz. drum-carded batt of silky, glossy, jet-black fiber from a llama named Kona (this picture came out much too brown):

4 oz. of roving from our buddy Michele:

Super Silky sportweight in Plum, a delicate rose-pink semi-solid:

Super Silky sportweight in Lily, a beautiful turquoise/teal. This is destined to become a lacy scarf for Molly, probably Branching Out:

A skein of naturally colored dark brown sportweight shot through with green and orange angelina sparkles:

All of it is silky soft and beautiful, and I can’t wait to work with it. If you’re interested in buying some yourself, you can do it through the Farmhouse Fibers website. Of the yarns I didn’t end up buying, the Phantom alpaca-silk blend (made from Paco’s fur!) was especially tempting, as was the Sassafras worsted weight.

Fred and Laura’s business is primarily online, not brick-and-mortar, so I really appreciated their taking the time out to host us crazy, obsessed knitters for a few hours on a Friday night. It was really a wonderful field trip, well worth the 40-minute drive, and the handspun yarn from Michele’s coat will be one of the best fibery souvenirs of Southern Indiana I could possibly take with me when I move.

When I saw Macoco’s fantastic Greta Garbo sweater, I became intrigued by the book it came from–Hollywood Knits, by Bill Gibb–so I added it to my shopping cart the next time I had an Amazon purchase to make. I didn’t know anything about the book aside from seeing that sweater, so it was a leap of faith to buy it. All I knew was what she’d posted–that it was a book of sweater designs inspired by classic photos of various Hollywood stars in knitwear.

(A brief long aside: I used to do this all the time back in high school. I found out about the Magnetic Fields from a friend from an online chat room and went out to buy a copy of Holiday based on his recommendation alone, having no idea what the band would sound like. I somehow obtained a paper catalog from Firebird Records and randomly ordered British folk rock CDs based on one-paragraph written descriptions of the music.

Nowadays, we depend so much on sample-before-you-buy, no-commitment purchasing, whether it’s downloading an entire album and listening to it for weeks before deciding to buy it, scarfing free samples at Costco, or buying 20 pairs of shoes at Zappos–something we discussed at knit night tonight–with the ability to return them all if you change your mind. We’re guarded, we’re picky, we use Metacritic to sort through dozens of reviews at once and can reject an album before ever hearing a single note of it.

But back in the day, I think I used to discover a lot more cool new stuff because of that necessary leap of faith. Once I had committed to the random purchase to learn about something new, I had an investment in it, and it was in my own best interest to give it a fair chance and find things to appreciate about the item I’d already bought. Sort of like an arranged marriage, maybe; once you’re committed, even if you might not have originally made that decision if you could have made a fully informed, consenting choice, you really try to find something to love.)

So, in that same spirit, I ordered the book. Oddly enough, almost all the listings for used copies of Hollywood Knits on Amazon have it as being by “Bill Gibbs,” but it should be Gibb, as far as I can tell, like this listing and this listing have it.

I’m kind of amazed that Macoco took her own leap of faith to make the sweater in the first place. The sweaters are all illustrated in two ways: 1) the photo of the inspiration sweater, and 2) a crazy 80s “fashion” line drawing of the sweater, very stylized and inevitably with gigantic, padded trapezoid shoulders tapering to a carrot-like waist. Some of the inspiration photos are sort of hard to see, too, so I guess you just have to read through the pattern and hope for the best.

Anyway, I thought I’d pay a little debt back to the Internet, and enable all you fickle noncommittal shoppers to get a taste of what’s inside Hollywood Knits. The Bill Gibb book, not the Suss Cousins one.

In no particular order, here are the photos of the patterns found in this book. There is interesting chatter about the patterns and the movie stars in all the facing pages.

Greta Garbo, in the sweater that piqued my interest in the first place.

Jean Harlow in a polo shirt.

Lana Turner in another polo shirt. Both of these seem kind of similar to Salina, from Vintage Knits.

Adele Jergens in a fluffy monstrosity.

Loretta Young in what might be a cute, classic cardigan. Who can tell?

Claudette Colbert in a pretty puff-sleeved blouse embroidered with flowers.

Vilma Banky in a tennis vest with flags on the chest. I would make one like this with two American flags and embroider “THESE COLORS DON’T RUN” across the stomach. I think that would be very classy.

Joan Crawford in a puff-sleeved sweater that’s sort of hard to separate from her overall suspendertastic, old-man-feeding-pigeons-in-the-park look.

Peggy Cummins in a turtleneck that might be very cute but also has giant shoulder pads for the Carroty look.

Cary Grant in a basic cabled V-neck. NEEDS MORE ANGORA AND SHOULDER PADS

Jane Greer in a sweet blazer, holding a giant tie

Jennifer Jones in a big textured coat I think I might love, if I could only see what the front of it would look like.

Dorothy Lamour in a bejeweled boatneck.

Jane Wyman in a shirt emblazoned with embroidered cigarettes.

Marilyn Monroe in a turtleneck vest thing with the neck pinned down by a brooch. It looks fabulous, but I suspect it loses some of the overall fabulous effect if you do not look like Marilyn Monroe.

Virginia Mayo in a bird sweater.

Robert Taylor, in a cabled sweater as boring as his name.

Gary Cooper, in a sweater with kind of an awesome colorwork band across the chest.

Errol Flynn. Yeah, baby!

crap, counting these now, I think I’m short one pattern, but I don’t know which one it is. Anyway, that’s at least 19 out of 20. Now you’ve sampled what’s inside, and can find excuses not to buy this book.

Tonight I’m visiting a llama farm with Kalani and Elli! Hopefully, many cute llama pictures to come.

So right after Cosmicpluto alerted me to the existence of the infinity dress, I ran right out and made myself one, too. Blurry photos:

It was so easy I can’t believe it–I want to make 10 more of these! Here’s the timeline:

Last night: Measured myself and drew out some schematics for cutting out the dress.
Today at lunchtime: Drove to Hobby Lobby , where print cotton jersey knits were on sale for $3.99 a yard (I hear you can get them for $1 a yard at Wal-Mart, but that’s all the way across town). You could choose from camouflage, pink with white floral, pink with white polka dots, blue stripes, blue with white polka dots, acid green with black polka dots, black with white polka dots, and white with black brocade. I decided on blue with white polka dots–thought about the stripes, but they don’t play well with circle skirts, and thought about the black, but thought it would be better to minimize the visual contrast between RS and WS of the fabric. I got 4 yards of it and have a lot left over.
Today at 7 PM: Cut out the four pieces for the dress. Tried to set up the sewing machine, found that the presser foot no longer wanted to raise itself up, cursed and struggled for a while. Ate dinner.
Today at 8 PM: Finally got the presser foot working again.
Today at 8:30 PM: Finished sewing the dress. One seam for the waist, one seam to stitch closed the waistband.

Here are the schematics I used:

• Circle skirt: Fold 60″ cotton jersey into quarters, then cut a 27″ quarter circle out of the fabric. I did this freehand, with one end of the measuring tape held at the central corner, inching the measuring tape gradually upwards and cutting the curve in short arcs.
• Circle skirt waist: Cut a 3.5 inch arc out of the central corner. Against all odds, this made a waistband that was slightly too big. According to mathematical principles, I thought this would give me a 22-inch waistband… is my math off? 2 pi r equals circumference? Anyway, it definitely ended up bigger than 22 inches.
• Straps: Erring on the side of slightly too wide, since I know the jersey fabric wants to roll up (it’s basically stockinette, after all) I cut two pieces along the length of the fabric, 13 inches times 100 inches. Basically these were lengthwise strips from the long edges of the entire remaining length of the cut of fabric.
• Waistband: I cut a crosswise piece from the end after cutting the straps lengthwise. This ended up being about 30 inches by 12 inches. I folded it in half for a 6-inch-tall waistband and overlapped the ends by about an inch when sewing it to the waist of the skirt.

I assembled this all with a straight stitch on my sewing machine, with the overlap of the waistband hidden behind the middle of one of the straps. I decided to sew the ends of the waistband together when I was done. Two seams.

If you decide to make one, I highly recommend pinning or clipping the pieces together before you start sewing. Once you’ve gone around about a quarter of the waist of the circle skirt, you just have a giant, tangled mess of twisted-up fabric and it’s very difficult to keep it all flat and aligned.