A while ago (yeah, this is a throw-way-back post) I played in a Game based on the Hunger Games called the Famine Game. My team was chosen to represent District 8: Textiles and we needed costumes which represented us and our district. Since we’re all girls, we tend to go with some shade of pink. Here’s what we came up with. It’s a skirt with 8 different textures and types of textiles.
We had to make 6 of these skirts so I wanted to design something that was cute but easy to make. The idea was to make a skirt with a wide elastic band (easier to size on people who were spread around the country including one pregnant teammate) with panels of different fabrics. My first plan was to use 16 different panels. Here are the sketches I created using a croquis from this site.
I decided to test it out before investing in a ton of fabric. Here’s the tester:
Yeah, it’s not only unflattering but also reminds me of a cross between a clown and a harlequin. What did I learn from this trial? First, cut down the number of panels. Second, make the panels wider. Third, make the overall amount of fabric less in the final skirts.
Ultimately we went with 8 panels which was totally appropriate since we were District 8. Each panel was 10″ wide (instead of 5″ in the tester skirt).
For the sewing, we did it assembly line style. We bought a yard of 8 different kinds of fabric. Some fabrics like lace actually required two yards since we needed to add an underlayment lest the skirts be a little more risqué than we intended. The fabrics were lace (with underlay), glitter dot, fuzzy, zebra pleather, velour, minky dot, sparkle satin and glitter mesh (with underlay). We cut each into 3 10″ strips. Then I serged the strips together. My serger was invaluable for these skirts.
Since the fabrics were all different widths, we then evened off the tops and bottoms to make it nice and square. If I were doing this again, I would sew all one side matching and then only have one edge to even off, but hindsight is 20/20. Then perpendicular to the different swathes of texture, we cut it into 3 strips. The strips were around 12”-14″ long which was the length of the skirt. I ended up with the short skirt that was only 12″ long but I’m short and was wearing stockings and shorts under mine anyways so it was no big deal.
The we pinned each strip to a length of 3″ wide black elastic measured for each woman. This was done very mathematically by first pinning the edges, then the middles, then matching the middles of each section and so on until it was pinned sufficiently to sew. I used black thread to sew across the elastic.
Next I stitched up the free sides of the skirt to make a tube. And finally I serged the bottom to give a nice finished edge.
I loved the way they turned out. The elastic meant they were comfy. They were totally on theme for both our all girl team and our district. They were easy. They were cost effective — each one was only about $20. And they were actually cute and flattering. I would totally consider wearing mine out if I had the right occasion. I only wish I’d had a pink pettiskirt underneath it to make it more poofy like in the sketch.
And here’s a look at all the skirts (sorry it’s not clearer, but you get the idea):
