Halfway to a Dress! (the easy half)

I have had about a yard of this fabric sitting around in my stash for a while.  I found it at JoAnn's in the clearance a while ago and bought a yard or so without a real plan for it.

I absolutely adore it - the wacky colors, the flowers and the polka dots - yay!  With the wide border pattern, the only thing it could be was a skirt.  Luckily for me, cutting it straight up the middle gave me plenty of fabric to make a pleated skirt.  I looked at some patterns online but for me the easiest thing was just to calculate the difference between the amount of material I had and my waist measurement and make even pleats.  I kept about a 3" width of fabric to make a waistband and that was really about it.  I'm quite happy with the results:

This was my first shot at putting in an invisible zipping into a garment and honestly, it was really easy.  There are instructions in the package and it turns out the super weird looking adjustable arm thing with two notches that came with my sewing machine is, in fact, a zipper foot (seriously, I've never seen a zipper foot that looks like this).  I made the skirt for Kevin's graduation but was deterred by the wet metal bleachers I would be sitting on for three hours.  So on a somewhat less rainy day this week the skirt and I joined lovely mommy Sarah for a ladies night out.

I'm so happy with my skirt, I might make a whole dress sooner rather than later....or maybe I'll start with a top.