Sewing Adventures: Lolita Skirt!

Hi everyone, it's Lin with exciting news! I finally made my first lolita piece of clothing... simple half elastic skirt! This is my first time ever really doing a piece of clothing in general...I've never really did anything people could wear other than this, so I'm happy.

I wanted to post my own "lolita story", but I think it'll have to wait. I'll probably do an audio for it instead, in case you guys wanna hear it.


How did I begin? Well I first started with the base of the skirt that you mainly see. I thought it was rather short at first, but nah. It was just fine! After this, I cut out the strips that would become the ruffle, connecting them and putting a very nice rolled hem upon the edge. The rolled hem is new to me and I really liked it. You'll be able to see a little of it on the picture below....

AH GEEZ, AH GEEZ THE RUFFLE...

....As well as the ruffle. Okay. So this huge long thing that's like...2 yards long = the ruffle. Let me sing of my woes. Before I started this project, I decided that I wanted to go get a ruffle foot. A ruffle foot basically does the ruffling for me, instead of me doing ruffles by hand. I know how to do ruffles by hand and I thought it was rather time consuming, but I looked up a guide to make it easier. So I was like "heh, I got this". No. That guide was NOT for something that was supposed to be a two yard long strip.

It took me a good three hours to finish the ruffling all around...as well as pin it to the base of the skirt at the appropriate length. I severely underestimated how long hand ruffling takes. And though I know now, I can't get a ruffler foot because Joann doesn't sell a ruffler foot that fits my Janome. Sucks.

At this point it took me about 5 hours to get here...mostly because I had no idea what the hell I was doing. :>

So here's a picture of the skirt in process! Sorry it's soooo messy around it, but when you've got a lot to do at the same time, it's like this. This is of the skirt in the middle of the process. It needs the top band, back elastic and gathering in the front. This is just the skirt with the base and the ruffle at the bottom.

To give a little info about my thought process making the skirt, a lot of people asked why I decided on that fabric. I decided on it because I definitely wanted something classic lolita, mainly because it's just harder to mess up this way. Class typically isn't really looked at as more technical, at least in my opinion, so a large variety of prints are typically accepted.

Next came the back of the skirt, the half elastic waist band. This one was fairly easy...the issue I had with it was that I kept failing to pin BOTH sides of the band and it kept leaving holes that I had to go back and patch up. Other than that, there really wasn't a big problem with it.

I'm going to use this one picture for two steps I made...first one was gathering the top of the front of this skirt. The second was inserting the waist band upon the skirt after. Since I had to patch up the few holes I made by missing the edge sometimes with the back of the band, I did the front of this much better than I did the back. :>

Andddddd, ta-da! That's pretty much my run down process on how I did the skirt. I'm not sure if I will sell it...it IS my first lolita skirt afterall. But I'll think about it, hahaha. Other than that, I hope you really liked this article on my skirt process. Let me know if you like this series and if I should keep going. Thanks for reading!