Christmas Tree Skirt

Tim and I are spending Christmas here in Bangkok, so I thought we'd give in and get ourselves a tree to amp up the Christmas-y-ness (?) of things (sometimes it's hard to believe it's the holidays when it's 90 degrees out).

Anywho, the plastic base of our artificial tree was not the most attractive, so I thought I'd make a skirt with some Christmas fabric I had on hand.  I found this great tutorial online and used it as the basis for mine. 

Here's what I did:

• Used 2 fabrics, cutting 4 wedges of each per the tutorial (I made my circle a bit smaller- more like 20 inches long).  
• Serged all of the wedges together, cut the hole in the center and covered all of the seams in red bias tape.  
• Bound the inner and outer edges of the circle with the single fold bias tape (that's all I had and I was too lazy to make my own), added some snaps down the back opening.  
• Skipped all of the layers- just a single layer of quilting cotton worked fine for me, but things might be different if you're trying to cover a bigger stand for a live tree.

Ta da! Came out pretty cute!  This skirt came together really quickly... it would be epically fast if I didn't mess around with the bias tape on the seams.

Anna Dress Wearable Muslin

Woo!  Anna dress done, finished in time for By Hand London's sew-along grand finale, but not photographed or blogged until now for reasons of laziness/moving chaos/international travel and adventure.

I am super jazzed about this dress because the pattern fit pretty much perfectly right out of the envelope.  No back gaping problems like others seemed to have. I didn't make any (purposeful) alterations, although I think I may have accidentally decreased the seam allowance on the back center seam a bit to 3/8 inch when I inserted the zipper.  No biggie.  I may have to add some bra strap stays, I think, because the neck is a teeny bit wide.

The dress was quite easy to put together, even with the dreaded facings.  Although I will say, damn Gina!, there was a lot of seaming in that skirt (check out the dress innards below)... my serger was like, "Dude. Seriously.":

This Anna is basically serving as a wearable muslin for me because I used some soooooper cheap fabric that I picked up here at a shop in Bangkok's Sampeng area.  I think its a cotton blend of some sort, pretty lightweight.  Guess how much it cost.  Just guess...  3 meters for 100 baht (about $3)!  Niiiice.

I'm pretty happy with my final product!  Things I need to work on: pattern matching (although the 7 part skirt probably made that unusually difficult) and invisible zipper insertion.  My invisible zipper is certainly not invisible and it catches a little bit, but ya know, it's a muslin.  And it was my first invisible zipper, so I'll call it a win because it goes up and down, ish.  In any case, I'm psyched to wear the dress out and about!