Christmas Gift Sewing: Pretty Printed Girl's Skirts

Hello! I hope you all had a lovely Christmastime! Mine was really, really great. The week before Christmas Liam and I went up North to spend time with both our families, which was lovely. We even got both families together for the first time since the wedding for a bit of a knees up at my lovely Sister-in-Law's house. It was fab. There was party food, drinks were flowing, and the little ones put a "show" on for us. Special times!

We came back down to London for our own little quiet Christmas here, and it was glorious. We ate more than seemed possible, watched films, played games, ate some more and then for good measure ate a bit more. On Boxing Day we went for a long walk and a bit of a look round the shops, followed by the BEST turkey leftovers curry I have ever tasted (thanks Liam!).

So that was my Christmas, and it was wonderful. I hope yours was too, whatever you were doing!

On to the sewing...

As always I left Christmas gift sewing quite late, but thankfully got it all done in time!

Here's what I sewed. Four gathered print skirts for some of our nieces. They turned out so well!

They're all gathered rectangles, lined, with a flat front waistband and an elasticated back waistband. Super simple but very pretty! They're all different sizes, unfortunately for me, and I didn't have the kids there to measure them myself. Their mums measured them and then I just did a bit of maths before cutting out.

Not much more to say about these, so prepare for picture overload!

I may have bought a few metres extra of this fabric...

I got lucky with a remnant piece for this one.

Poppy print for Poppy. She's the littlest one so her skirt didn't need much fabric. I managed to score this Liberty remnant on eBay for £10

Cotton lining 

Elasticated back waistband

I made luggage tag labels with care instructions on the back, to make the gift even more special. Here's Lula's skirt all ready to be wrapped up! Bad lighting courtesy of an English December.

I chose the fabrics based on their favourite colours and their styles. Plus I had a request for a matching Cabbage Patch doll dress from one the little ones! Of course that was way harder than the skirts. There may have been a lot of swearing whilst I was sewing that bias binding to the arm holes, along with the proclamation that "I don't care what happens, I am NEVER making a doll dress again!!!!"

Luckily I had a piece of velcro in my sewing box!

For the doll dress I was working from a table of measurements I found online, which was helpful but did leave me wondering if I'd done all my calculations correctly and if it would fit. I'm reliably informed that it fits like a glove (well, a dress)! Hooray!

Most importantly, the girls love their skirts, they all fit and a few of them even got worn on Christmas Day. It was well worth the effort!

I even found time after all that to make myself a Christmas dress! I only got one photo of it on Christmas Day itself, so as soon as I have photographed it properly I will have that to share with you too.

Until next time! xxx