I guess I did sew a lot in the past week after all!

An email list I'm on, NMSL, is running a "sewalong" right now. Nothing fancy or formal, it's just so we can encourage each other to actually sew. I was feeling like I hadn't really been sewing, when I stopped to think about the last week and realized I had actually sewn quite a bit!

Let's see -- last week Sunday I finished a 6-gore elastic waist skirt for me. It was the same pattern as the handkerchief skirt, Simplicity 4138, but the more "boring" long view without any flounce. The fabric was a dark eggplant suedecloth with a pale pink floral print that had followed me home from Lorraine's bargain loft a couple of months ago. It was so dark that I didn't have any threads in the purple family that worked, so I wound up using brown thread!

I had just over 2 yards left, when 2 of my daughters announced that they needed brown skirts for Tuesday's "Color Day." 2nd and 3rd grade girls had been assigned brown and white. (And I don't believe in white skirts, especially for little girls!) I didn't really have brown fabric, or time to run to the store, so we declared this fabric "brown enough" and I made each of them a skirt Monday evening, without a pattern!

What I did: I cut the remaining yardage exactly in half so that I was guaranteed to have enough for both girls. Then I folded the fabric on the diagonal from the corner (twice) to make the biggest diagonal I could possibly get from that length of fabric, and cut out a circle. I used the remaining fabric to cut a rectangle to be the "yoke," then cut a second circle out of the middle, estimating to make the circumference come out equal to the width of my yoke minus the seam allowances. I adjusted the yoke seam to make it match exactly, and I made a fold-down casing elastic waist. On the first skirt, I only made the top part 8 inches deep (before seams and casing) and while it worked, I didn't quite feel it was long enough for long-term wear, so I cut the second one more like 12 inches. I was much happier with it, and it does make it easier for the girls to tell their skirts apart. (Their waist measurements are very very close.)

On Wednesday, all the kids were home, so I wasn't really planning to sew anything, but a friend called me on Tuesday and asked if I could hem a couple of pairs of pants for her. (Okay, for her husband and son.) They came over Wednesday morning for me to mark the hems. Wednesday evening I finally grabbed the time to do it: I closed the crotch seam on a pair of boy's dress pants and hemmed and cuffed 1 pair each of boy's and men's dress pants so they could have them back by Friday afternoon. (Since Thursday was Thanksgiving, and we were busy.)

Then yesterday (Sunday) I finished a custom order black velvet snood and worked on another custom order, but didn't make so much progress on the second one.

Still, I did do a lot of sewing after all.