Red Spice Diamond Skirt

This is actually the very first dress I ever made from scratch! But, I'm sure you're saying to yourself, the title says skirt...  Well, it was a really freaking ugly dress.  And I only did one of the armholes properly, I'm not even sure how. At least I didn't bother putting a zipper in. Need evidence? See Exhibit A below.

Honestly, I don't know what I was thinking when I bought this fabric. It was one of my first fabric purchases, so I'm guessing I was swayed by the gold and ikat-like pattern. But unfortunately, it doesn't really press well, and the gold design is actually really stiff even though the rest is kind of drapey.

Plus, I learned a valuable lesson in pattern placement.

I finally decided to hack this "dress" up after about a year in limbo. I decided to salvage half of it and turn it into a skirt (instead of turning it into decorative pillow cases which was the only other reasonable thing I could think to do with this fabric). So this is the bottom of a princess seam dress/a paneled skirt.  I cut it off around the natural waist, and made a waistband out of a large rectangular strip on the cross grain and folded in half.  I tried to edge stitch/stitch-in-the-ditch to attach it to the rest of the skirt and didn't really succeed, but it looks passable.

And here's the finally wearable skirt!  I was really stumped on what to wear with this skirt since my go-to is a white cami or tee, but it looked terrible with the beige background of the print.  But luckily, I was able to shamelessly copy Katy of Katy & Laney when I saw her Sahara bustier and skirt.



The skirt ended up with a nice A-line shape to it due to the slight stiffness of the fabric.

And, this cami (an old gift from my aunt) actually has a really neat feature that I'd never seen before. It essentially has 2 necklines just by turning the shirt around, a v-neck and a square neck.  No tags so it really can be worn both ways.

And the back view! Ok, ok, I know my hair is covering pretty much everything, but I promise there's a short hand-picked zipper in the center back seam.



So now that you've seen my dirty little WIP secret, anyone else care to share their sewing mishaps? And what does everyone else do when a project goes awry? Chuck it in the trash? Cut it up for muslins?