I'm back! (and with a great Martha Stewart skirt!)

I know, I know…this blog is called “Hicks Girls.”  This half of Hicks Girls has been absent from the blogosphere.   I don’t have a good excuse.  I have long been wanting to blog about my projects, but then, as I’m working on something, I forget to take pictures, then I never sit down to write, and before I know it, I’ve long forgotten about my intentions!  But, I want to start anew!  I’ve been on a sewing frenzy lately, so I hope to do better at picture-taking and blog-writing.  I get so much out of the other sewing and crafting blogs, that I want to give back to the community, so to speak.  So, here I go with one I actually wrote earlier this summer…

If you know Kelby or me AT ALL, or read this blog or our Facebook posts, you know we are BIG (HUGE) Martha Stewart fans.  I own three of her large books: Martha Stewart’s Cooking School, Martha Stewart’s Encyclopedia of Crafts, and my latest acquisition, Martha Stewart ‘s Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts.

So, for my first Martha Stewart sewing project, I decided to tackle the A-Line Wrap Skirt on pages 176-177 of the Encyclopedia of Sewing and Fabric Crafts.  As far as articles of clothing are concerned, I have only tried my sewing hand at skirts so far.  I tried a wrap skirt from another book last summer, and had some problems due to some errors in the book, so I was ready to try something new and easy.  The instructions for Martha’s wrap skirt take up only one page with 5 illustrated drawings.  My kind of project!   Here is the finished product: (I wanted to have a photo of my actually wearing the skirt, but I kept forgetting to have Hubby take it when I was wearing it!)

I am thrilled with the end result!  It’s cute, light-weight for summer, and only took me a few hours over two days to complete.  I chose a black and white gingham fabric for the panels because, one, I LOVE gingham, but also, I was inspired by the May issue of INStyle magazine, which had a whole article on how to wear gingham this season.  As for the process of making the skirt, a few observations…the Martha Stewart book comes with a CD of project patterns and templates in PDF format.  While this is awesome, when you have something with big pieces, like this skirt, you have to print everything out on 8 ½ x 11 paper and then piece it together.  Whether it was an error with the CD or my printer, I don’t know, but the sheets did not go together very well.  It took some guess work on my part to make everything fit.  That was a little frustrating.  Also, as far as I can tell so far, the book does not include a size chart.  The pattern has markings for sizes small, medium and large, but nothing to tell you what body measurements are attributed to each size.  So, I decided to go with the large; since it’s a wrap skirt, I figured I couldn’t go wrong.

The only other difficulty I had was at the end, sewing the hem.  I knew from the wrap skirt I did last year, that it’s hard to double fold and then stitch a curved edge.  Martha doesn’t give any hints here, so I just made up my own “technique.”  (Let me back up…I had to take FOUR INCHES off of the bottom of the skirt just to bring it up to my knees.  Sigh.  I’m short.)  I clipped the entire hem of the skirt, making ¼” cuts and spacing the clips about every ½”.   (Martha has you do this on the waist edge of the skirt panels, so I thought I would mimic this idea to get the hem to lie flat.)  After clipping, I folded the hem about ½” and pressed the fold.  Then folded another ½” and pressed again.  THEN I edge-stitched the entire hem.  It’s probably not a “real” seamstress-way to do this, but it worked for me.

I’m excited to try more projects from this book!  Let me know if you try it too!