Spongebob Two-Layer Twirly Skirts

I whipped up two cute ruffled skirts for the girls yesterday.  I can't believe I got them done in one day! That is amazing for me.  I went from finding a cute skirt tutorial online, to picking fabric out of my stash, to cutting, serging and by the end of the day, the girls were twirling around in their new skirts!  What a day!  I'm sure it would only take an hour for a person who has no interruptions, but I expected it to take a few days at least.

The skirts are two-layers.  There is an upper skirt (Spongebob fabric) and an underskirt (solid yellow).  They are sewn together with an elastic waistband, which I managed to sew on upside down on one of the skirts. Oops.  I like that they are two layers, but I'm not thrilled with the waistbands.  I think they are too bunchy and I will have to topstitch them later.  Next time I make the skirts, I will shorten the width of the waistband so that when the elastic pulls it together, it isn't so bunchy.  "Bunchy" is a technical term. It is!

I tried to topstitch the waistbands to flatten them out a bit, but my sewing machine is being rebellious!  It was sewing some really wonky lines of straight stitches that were anything but straight. Eh, I'll deal with that later. I made the skirts on the serger only! That is kind of cool! 

The photos on the blog where I found the instructions to make the pattern and the skirt are much better.  I don't know if those skirts were made of a fabric that lays down better or if my sewing skills just need some work (I'm rusty, I admit it), but my skirts didn't turn out with the same "hang" to them as the skirts on the instructions.  I also cannot see the waistbands on the instructions, I may have done that wrong.

Me? Measure wrong?  Hard to imagine, but it could have happened with the waistbands.  I measured wrong on the ruffles and took me hours to figure out why my ruffles were so much shorter than the width of the skirts.  The ruffles need to be longer in order to ruffle!  The instructions say "For a ruffle take the length of the bottom skirt portion and multiply by 1.5. Divide by 2, and measuring on fold, the width that you just came up with."  Well, I had the lower skirt folded since I just cut it on the fold, and did the math from there, which means I divided by 2 before I even started to figure out how long the ruffle should be. Whoops.  It was an easy fix, I just cut more ruffle but each skirt has two more ruffle seams than it should. I decided not to tell the girls.

While I'm not totally thrilled with the skirts yet, I do love the pattern and I think I'll be making a few more before I give up on it.  Next time I'll shorten up the waistband width, and double the width on my ruffle pattern piece that is only half of what it should be.

I think the girls need shirts too.  Another project perhaps?