Island Inspired Skirts Part 1

Last week, I talked about the skirts worn by women in Micronesia, tiny islands in the Pacific.  I was inspired by these locally designed and hand made skirts.

The fabric for all the skirts is solid colored polyester cotton broadcloth.  The polyester cotton fabric is inexpensive and easily obtained.  It's also quite a bit tougher than 100% cotton fabric, which is important for working clothes that are worn year round and washed frequently.  Polyester cotton fabrics don't breathe as well as 100% cotton, but in a loose skirt, that's hardly a problem.

I began with the idea that hand guided machine applique is a lot of work and decided to try embroidery instead.  The lavender skirt is the result.  I was inspired by a set of lotus flower designs at Embroidery Library and decided to design a skirt around them.  Built in decorative stitches are used to decorate the hem and top of the ruffle.

I liked the wrap style skirts from Kosrae and decided to make some of those also.

This skirt was inspired by finding dark mahogany thread, exactly the color of really good, show quality Rhode Island Red chickens.   Unfortunately the placement of the rooster was not where I'd really intended it to be.  Adding the chick was my attempt to fix the problem.  Since the front of the skirt is asymmetric anyway, with the decorative stitching on the hem and at the slit, it sort of works.

The back of the skirt features white leghorn chickens, with the originally intended spacing of the embroidery.

Both these skirts have seen many years of use.  They were early efforts at embroidery, before I understood much about the uses of stabilizer.  They also have very dense designs on lightweight fabric, which did cause some puckering.  The lavender skirt eventually developed tears in the fabric at the pointy edges of the embroidery.  They are far from perfect, but they did get me started with skirt design, embroidery, and the uses of built in decorative stitches.

Come back next week for more fun with a sewing machine.