Last week was pretty quiet, mainly because Ben and I hardly saw one another. With him pulling long hours in the office trying to get a months-delayed paper out for publication, and me working every night until almost midnight, our schedules only coincided for a bleary-eyed few minutes over coffee each morning. So when Thursday rolled around, when Ben had finally sent off his paper and I had my one day off, we thought it was high time to kick back and play a bit. So we headed to the beach, had a few drinks, and flew a cheap kite I had bought. Having lived most of my life in places where kite-flying is really impossible (too many trees, too little wind), it's still a completely thrilling thing to fly kites. There's something about holding the tether of anything airborne that I've never quite gotten over.



With all that time alone last week I got a jump on that skirt and finished it yesterday. I'm pretty happy with how it came out, although it took a while to convince my sewing machine to treat it properly -- who knew that small differences in thread and needles would matter so much?



This is my first clothing project (as far as I can remember) that I've done where I've used new, non-repurposed fabric. I suppose until now (since I've been basically teaching myself how to sew) there has been less percieved risk in using cheap and found fabrics. Screwing up certainly seemed a lot less painful when I didn't have anything invested in the fabric I used.

Even this time, I couldn't quite bring myself to use the good stuff. I found the fabric in a remnants bin (and even so, it was more painful when I screwed up). But not getting the good stuff was sort of intentional. I really liked the irregular stitching, the "factory edge" of the cloth, that runs along the middle. The piece came from the very interior of the bolt, where "bad" fabric was adhered to the cardboard bolt tube and stitched to the edge of the "good" fabric. The odd stitching describes the border between the "good" and "bad" fabrics. It gave it a one-off quality that I thought might help gloss over whatever imperfect stitching I might do (and it does). But whatever it may do to the looks of the skirt, it sure makes for a good story to tell when I wear it.