I had the horrible realization last week that all the skirts in my closet are the wrong length! I’ve apparently just left behind a ten year phase of wearing skirts that hover close to or below the knee. Right now I’m loving the idea of a mini-ish skirt with tights and flats.

I’ve had Jenny Gordy’s Tulip Skirt pattern from Stitch magazine on my list for months so this was the logical place to start building a new skirt wardrobe from. I’m a huge fan of her lovely line, “Wiksten“. I would happily wear anything she designed. Luckily, Jenny just posted her errata from the pattern which helped to sort out some things that confused me when tracing the pattern sheet.

The sewing is simple for this skirt, the most confusing thing were the directions and lack of diagrams to help clarify. I’m still not sure if I did the facing correctly, I ended up just using the regular waistband pieces to create a matching facing. It seemed like there were other pieces I was supposed to trace on the pattern sheet, but they didn’t make sense to me. The one thing I modified was the tie. I wanted something a bit bigger, longer, perhaps evoking some Blair Waldorf.

As I was cutting out the fabric (which is a Daiwabo print) and eating some blackberries Andrew bought me, I realized that they were both the same colour. I’m loving this dark purple-y colour so much right now. I was pretty sure I’d find a good quote mentioning blackberries in ‘Peter Rabbit’ by Beatrix Potter for my typewritten label. I have the entire set of her charming books.

As for the buttons of the skirt, I’ve been holding on to a set of typewriter keys for a very long time with the intention of using them as buttons on a skirt. Let me first say that these came from a typewriter that I found banged up on the streets of New York. I took it home to see if it could be saved, but really it was beyond repair. I would never harm a working typewriter and neither should you! I carefully removed all the buttons and have kept them all these years. Of course, then there was the dilemma of what to spell with my five buttons. Keeping in mind I couldn’t repeat any of the letters. In the end, the perfect word seemed to be, ‘SKIRT’.