Rainy Day Project: Swing Set Skirt

The weather here has been yucky the past few days.  It's been warmer than normal but also very cloudy and wet.  It has me in a bit of a funk.  Yesterday I was looking for a cute, fun, quick project to help lift my mood.  This is what I came up with:

 

Oliver + S Swingset Skirt

It's a modified version of the Oliver + S Swingset skirt.  I love sewing skirts, they are quick and easy and Piper loves to wear them.  In the mornings when I get her dressed I give her options, 9 times out of 10 she wants to wear a skirt.  This skirt was no exception to quick and easy.  I did modify it a bit.

I wanted the lining to hang out a bit at the bottom so I switched the top skirt and lining skirt pieces.  Did that make sense?  Essentially the lining is on top and the skirt is on the bottom according to the pattern pieces.

The pattern uses a drawstring at the waist.  I didn't feel like making button holes and wanted something simple and easy to wear so I opted to eliminate the drawstring.  At the waist, I sewed the lining and top skirt together opposite the directions, then turned them right sides out.  I then top stitched the two.  Then I sewed 3/8" from the top and 1 3/8" below (leaving a 2" opening for adding the elastic) to create a casing.  This sort of gave the skirt a paper bag waist.  You can kind of see here what I did:

For one final touch, I added a little bling.

I was able to almost finish the entire skirt from first cut to last stitch during nap time.  Unfortunately someone in our house is taking shorter naps than she used to so I am getting less done during nap time.  

Piper's been watching the Tinkerbell series of movies a lot lately so I was pretty excited when I found some Tinkerbell fabric at WalMart recently.  Have you seen the Tinkerbell movies?  I have to admit, when DH first brought one home I was a little annoyed.  He knows my position on princess-culture.  (I know what you are thinking, we had a Brave birthday party.  Merida is different, she's strong and independent and gets dirty).  Turns out the Tinkerbell movies are not so bad either.  Tinkerbell is also a strong female character (a little hot headed) but she's a "tinker" fairy.  More or less, Tinkerbell is an engineer of the fairy world.  She builds things to solve every day problems the fairies have.  I guess I can't complain about that.  

Anyway, hopefully the weather will improve soon.  If not, I've got plenty more fabric for sewing quick, cute skirts for Piper to wear. :)