Gertie’s Knit Pencil Skirt

I completed this project almost two months ago, taken pictures shortly after but didn’t have time to blog about it. Life is so busy lately that sometimes I would like to sleep for days in a row. Work is freacking crazy right now, and we have Daisy at the vet since more than three weeks ago (Billy is keeping her company), where she’s fighting for her life. She got heavy metal poisoning (I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what she swallowed), and the side effect was renal damage. She’s on heavy medications to keep her uric acid levels at bay, but that means injections every two days and a weekly blood sample to test for levels (they can do it more often due to the little weight birds have). We’re so stressed out about her that we can hardly get enough sleep.

But let’s get on with what we’ve come here for. This is the knit pencil skirt from second Gertie’s book. I wanted to try to set a pencil skirt for ages but never got the time or the courage for it. I had this sweatshirt fabric  leftover from another project that will show you soon and decided that a knit pencil skirt would be the ideal to start with and find out if pencil skirts were something for me.

I chose my size according to my measurements and the sizing, as usual, was right with Gertie (unless we’re talking about Butterick Gertie’s patterns). I didn’t even have to shorten the skirt, and for my desired length, I just had less than 1 cm to turn in to hem it. I am 1.58 m (petite), so for taller (regular) people, you will need to lengthen the pattern piece for sure.

I got my hem a bit stretched out since I don’t know how to change the foot pressure on my new machine, but reaped it and added wash away quilters tape to it and it worked fine. I did a twin needle hem.

For the rest, this was a very quick project, since there’s just one pattern piece, and the result is very forgiving due to the stretchy nature of the fabric and the elastic band at the waist.

I could test this skirt during the Screamin’ Festival last week, and I got a lot of wear out of it, especially when we were chilling out at the apartment, since I forgot to include anything else especially comfortable for when we were in (resting, cooking or eating). This skirt was like wearing pajamas.

Something that annoyed me a bit was that the skirt used to ride up my hips a bit when I took long walks in it. I don’t know if it’s due to a wrong sizing/fitting.

For the rest, I love the skirt, and I may jump top the pencil skirt bandwagon, at least if they are made of a stretch fabric. I am not sure I could walk a lot in a non-stretchy pencil skirt (unless it has a good sized vent).