I finally sewed something new for this month. This was a (fairly) easy project, because I needed a quick success after beginning the month with a total failure (which you probably won’t see me wearing!).

This skirt is made from a thrifted dress, with the trim made from a thrifted shirt almost identical in colour and weight to the tie that came with the dress – they were meant to be together! The dress was strapless and I initially intended to wear it during my pregnancy, which I did, but not often. Since then I felt a strapless dress wasn’t really very practical, and the bodice didn’t fit me properly anyway. But the fabric! It has little riverside scenes in beautiful colours, and is a lightweight cotton lawn – not always an easy fabric to find.

I cut the bodice off, but used it as a waistband, and added the trim to the bottom of the skirt for some extra length. As with so many of my projects, it was simple in concept but became somewhat involved, requiring piecing bits of fabric together, adding elastic, unpicking seams, etc. There was also a stain on the front of the skirt, which blended with the print but kept bothering me, so I took some bleach on a q-tip to it and happily it almost disappeared.

This is a dirndl skirt, i.e. a gathered rectangle, a shape I have come to like in recent years. I think it’s a more fashionable style now than it used to be; but I also find it very comfortable to wear. I’ve loved skirts for a long time, especially in summer, but my lifestyle right now involves a lot of heavy lifting and getting down on the floor, so I need my skirts to be casual and accommodating. Dirndl skirts at knee length serve this purpose well. I’ve found that hemming them knee-length or just above, and keeping them in a lightweight fabric, makes them look breezy rather than frumpy.