Little 4 Awhile Rachel Skirt

So I had made my niece a trial skirt - the Sophia Tiered Skirt from Funktional Threads - and then waited to hear the reaction and feedback on the sizing.  Well, it was a hit!  And they said that it was a bit big, which was good!  So of course I had intentions - and fabric already - to make some more.  But first, I decided to try another - less intensive - skirt pattern.  Enter the Rachel skirt, from Little 4 Awhile.  This has the added advantage of being free!  (Anyone who makes skirts for charity, take note!)

For my first iteration, I basically made it as is.  It is a very basic skirt which can be made in either knit or woven fabric.  I chose to use woven for this.  The skirt is gathered to fit the waistband, and the bottom trim band is the exact length of the skirt - no ruffles here.  This is a size 4, and I made the elastic an inch shorter than I had on the Sophia skirt, based on the feedback of that one being a bit large.

For my next iteration, I used my ruffler foot or my serger to play around with gathering - which made it non exact.  (I was using both the ruffler foot and the serger for various pieces at that point - don't remember which I used here.)  The only thing with using either of those - which worked great, by the way! - is that unless you do more math than what I was willing to do at that point, you don't know exactly how the gathering is going to turn out.  I.e., you need to ruffle more than you think you'll need and then put it together.  This didn't bother me - I just cut extra length for my middle and bottom tiers, stitched them together, gathered them, and then put them together with the waistband before stitching the last seam.  (Does that make sense?)  And after the first one, I decided to go with ruffles at the bottom edge - these are double layer, because I have no desire to hem it all. ;)

So there's a story with these two skirts.  A friend's little daughter really loves Spiderman, which is a bit unusual, and her favorite color is brown, which is rather unusual.  She just had a birthday, and I thought it'd be really neat to try to combine these two favorites.  Sadly, there were no Spiderman prints available which were really brown-friendly, but this was the closest I could find.  And this brown print was the one that best coordinated, so I went with it.  At the time, I wasn't sure what pattern I was going to use, so I bought more than I thought I'd need.  (Um, yeah....I had more than enough to make a second skirt for my niece.)  Since I didn't know a waist measurement (and didn't want to spoil the complete surprise by asking), I used buttonhole elastic in this one - my first time.  I heard that it turned out great!