A Finished Product

I think I figured out one of the reasons I love my new hobby of sewing.

A downside of being a homemaker is that often there is no finished product at the end of the day to show for your hard work. The dinner was eaten, the cleaned room messed up again, the children will need to be cared for and trained and fed and read to and loved again the next day.

I know that this job of homemaker and mother is really, really worthwhile and important and I am so grateful to have it, but still there is no finished product to gaze at and feel that sense of accomplishment.

I've talked with several other women who have left the career world to stay home with their kids and the adjustment to a new type of productiveness where you often feel very unproductive is one of the hardest aspects of the transition.

All that was a long way of saying, with sewing there is a finished product!

This weekend I made this skirt for my daughter and it is my favorite creation yet!
She had a skirt in this style as a toddler and I loved it, but have not found another like it to get in a bigger size. So, I made one! And another awesome thing about sewing? You can create things in just the colors you want, so this will match pretty much every shirt in her closet!


Here's how I did it:

1. I used this tutorial that I've used before for the base of the skirt, which was a mint green t-shirt (you can see it as the top layer of the skirt in the top picture).

2. Next I cut 4 inch wide strips from 4 different material for the ruffles (the length was 2 times the length of the bottom of the skirt measuring all the way around).

3. I hemmed one long side of each ruffle, and did an overcast stitch on the other side of the strip to prevent fraying on the top edge of the ruffle.

4. Sewed a basting stitch (long, temporary stitches) just under the overcast stitching and then pulled one of the threads to gather creating the ruffles until the length of the ruffled strip was the same as the width of the skirt.

5. Pinned each layer of ruffle to the t-shirt skirt base and sewed them on using just a basic stitch right on top of the basting stitch.

And then it was done!

The elastic waist combined with soft t-shirt under-layer make this super comfortable which is of high importance to my little girl and I love the way it looks on her!


And that skirt?

Unlike the cooking, cleaning, laundry, child rearing, errand running, etc. is a finished product!


This post is part of the Moms' 30-Minute Blog Challenge.

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