Self-dyed Floss Fur Pencil Skirt
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| Alabama Chanin Fur Technique |
- Weight increases significantly with the thread, being backstitch plus long tails. Total garment weight of this knee length skirt 294 grams.
- Feels nice and heavy and potentially warm. Would try this as a pant for winter. Black on black.
- Took up to 60 skeins of semco embroidery floss, which I assume is standard 8m per floss. Originally calculated 1 skein per 10x10cm swatch. This is true but slightly more requires after you fill in the empty pockets between the spirals. Originally believed 50 skeins required. So not far off. Some skeins were discarded in the process due to just mistakes in my dying & organising process but not a lot. Overall, pretty sure this used no more than 60 skeins. For this particular brand I think each skein is 2g.
- Stitched with 4 strands of floss throughout.
- Embroidery went straight over the darts, once folded on the correct position.
- Used McCall’s basic pattern for pencil skirt with negative ease ie downsized. Although densely embroidered, skirt still stretches. Can’t comment on how much it stretches % because I don’t want to push it to limit but definitely enough for a 75cm finished waist skirt to stretch over a 98cm butt and a waist that’s 80 ish cm. I would be confident that it could stretch more.
- Normally for a less embroidered skirt 68cm waist finished measurement stays snug on me on true waist, maybe too snug? 75cm unembroidered is comfy in true waist and even borderline big. 80cm sits loose on my high hips. These descriptions are for after the cotton jersey relaxes after an hour of wear.
- Very happy with elastic alternative using two layers. Underneath is the stronger but dull brown 25mm FOE. On top is the weaker but prettier 20mm FOE with sheen (although not folded, only placed on outside). Both from China/AliExpress/eBay.
- Construction totally done with polyester sew all thread. Seams done with 8x thread thickness. Elastic done with 4x thread thickness. 4x has proven strong enough for seams many, many times over but felt like increasing strength for this skirt and I think it’s a great idea.
- Do I like doing knots? Previously I wrote it’s not necessary. Still believe that if you double over first and last stitch. I really don’t like the aesthetic of the actual knot on the spirals on close inspection. I think it’s an interruption. But strangely I got so fast at doing the knots, faster than doubling over the stitch on itself – so this skirt has a blend of many techniques. There are knots on around 15% of the spirals. I consider this all experimenting (without doing the swatches) yay! Any technique that made this project faster was worth inviting.
- The feel of the texture on the skin is good. Knots are so so itchy, past a certain density. This one is all outside knots. No problem.
- Will still need to dip garment into fixative to glue the dye for the embroidery floss, so that garment becomes durable for warm wash.
- Best part of being unable to achieve even dyeing is that the embroidery floss becomes slightly variegated which gave an effect I really liked. Definitely need to improve dye methods for floss. Real pain in the ass to have individual skeins (but at clearance 100 skeins = 200gm for $9, can’t go wrong)
- Skirt is double layer, required two 3XL men’s shirts. This one’s organic cotton.
