Bank Holiday Monday - a quick skirt from a dress

Sun shining and green things growing, flowery things flowering and animally things making new animally babies.

Definitely feels like Spring today.

I was pleased to see my little seedlings starting to poke little green tips through in the greenhouse and the first little salad and radish seedling poking through in the poly tunnel too.

That wait for the first green shoots to appear is nerve wracking - full of self doubt - was my compost right, have I over watered or under watered, has it been too cold - and then the relief when you realise that everything is doing what it should be doing.

After that I ran off to my studio again - beginning to wonder if I am developing an obsession.

Anyway - decided to have a go at cutting up a dress I bought at a car boot sale which turned out to be too tight in the bodice to breath, so I though I would turn it into a skirt instead.

I started by unpicking the zipper so that I could stash that for another project later on, then just pinned at the length I wanted to the skirt to be, left a generous margin for hemming and snipped away.

Rather than be too fancy with the waist band, I decided just to elasticate it, so I hemmed a small amount of material along the cut edge, then folded it over with a 1.5cm allowance to run the elastic through and ran a line of machine stitching across. Then with a safety pin in the end of the elastic as a guide, I pulled the elastic through, and just sewed the two elastic edges together and finished the gap in the hem with a couple of hand stitches.

 
To finish off the waist band I took a length of woven brown ribbon (which was recycled from some lace up boot style slippers) and hand stitched that roughly around the waist, then added a bit of gold braid, once again hand stitched to the ribbon.

I want to take some time this month, as well as getting the garden and livestock sorted out, to get a few things made up ready for my Etsy shop, which I want to revamp and jazz up a little. 

I started today with some bags, one an organic cotton bag that I have started to refurbish with some embroidery and hand made flowers, and another bag which is one of those freebies that you seen on the cover of magazines occasionally which I started work on by adding some wool trim. 

These are not finished yet, some sequins, beads and more trim to go, but these will be available for sale in May.