Attempting Voile

When I shopped Purl Soho's Memorial Day sale, I bought fabric for three skirts. The first two are done, along with matching ones for my daughter, but I saved the voile for last. I had to work my way up to it, I think. For starters, I had no idea what to expect when I ordered it. I was thinking something gauzy, maybe? Definitely summery. For some reason I was enchanted with the idea of voile, sight unseen. No place around here has any, not the box store or the quilting stores, as far as I could tell. So it was a surprise.

It's not gauzy, for starters. It IS thin. It reminds me, truth be told, of an old, worn-in cotton sheet. Soft, thin cotton. It took more care to cut it. I switched to a smaller needle size, went way down on stitch length (about 1.75 mm, I think; lordy it takes forever to stitch a seam at that length!), adjusted the tension a bit, and called it good. I'm not working from a pattern for this skirt. I'm working from an idea. Since voile is thin, and I'm not one to wear a slip, I wanted a two-layer skirt, with a drawstring. The hardest bit so far has been the hemming.

I'm still working on mastering my rolled hem foot. It would have been perfect for this skirt. I'm making progress--I can get a nice hem once I get going, but the transition from the starting bit to the automatic bit is still wonky, so for this project, I ironed a narrow hem. Sorry for the poor quality of photos; my creative space is often in the basement, in the evening.

(You know, I loved this fabric pattern online, but after several days of quiet struggling with it, I keep thinking it looks like lettuce.)

I'm almost done with the skirt, as of Wednesday evening. The two layers--longer on the bottom, shorter on top--are sewn together at the top. All that's left to do cut a couple of buttonholes (for the drawstring to come out from), sew them by hand (because I have more confidence in that than my buttonhole foot), and sew the casing closed at the bottom.

The buttonholes are marked, but I thought it best to leave it for the night, perhaps to pick it up again this evening. My original plan was to make the drawstring from the voile by basically creating a narrow binding tape. Despite my difficulties working with the fabric, I think this skirt is going to come pretty close to the picture I had in my head when I began. That's one of the big pleasures for me, in making something--working out the how, and getting my idea out of my head and realized in yarn, or fabric, or paper, or thread. Do you enjoy that part?

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