SWAP is finally started ...

It seems that no post of mine is complete without a rant about Spotlight.  When I first started planning my SWAP I wanted to use chocolate brown sateen as my base.  I visited Spotlight in Hobart and they had tons of black and every colour known to man - except brown, in fact they told me it didn't come in brown!  I decided to wait until I got home at christmas time and visit one of the stores up there.  Although I couldn't find brown sateen, I did manage to find a really lovely cotton suiting with a little stretch.  I don't know what it is, but it really is lovely with a great hand, great weight and just the right amount of stretch.

While I was contemplating my SWAP, I changed my mind and decided I would like to use black.  Safe in the knowledge that I had seen plenty of black, I went to Spotlight and guess what I found?  No black.  But they suddenly have a lot of chocolate brown.

As I am going home at the end of this month, I hope I will never have to set foot in Spotlight Hobart again.  Here endeth the rant.

And here starts my SWAP.

This is BWOF 02-11-103, which I made for last years SWAP.  It really is my favourite pencil skirt ever and I've made four versions of it and there will be more.

The picture of the front is overexposed and the spot on the hip is water.  I just happened to leave my failed birthday dress on Vera and this skirt looks good with it.  Maybe I'll shorten it to a top.

The back shot is clearer but the skirt still looks worse than it is in real life.  The reason for this is because I broke my much loved Sunbeam iron.  My friends at home have bought me a gravity feed iron for my milestone birthday, but I told them to hang on to it until I get home.  In the interim I have purchased a cheap iron that is total crap and irons very poorly.

This skirt is lined with a weird shaped bit of stretch charmeuse I got at the op shop for 50c.

The other thing that I've managed to cock up is printing my labels.  Some time ago now Kristy came up with a great idea for using t shirt printing sheets to make labels you can iron onto ribbon.  I've been doing this successfully ever since. That is, until this weekend.  When I printed out the iron on sheet, I forgot to reverse the print so when I ironed it onto the ribbon it was in reverse.  I now have 30 reversed labels.  I'm going to use them all because it makes me laugh.

 

 

I've almost finished a pair of pants from the same fabric, which I hope to photograph better than the skirt!

 

I've also made a hat from a corduroy remnant.  It's V8440 and I've also made this many times.  I've lined it with the last of the stretch charmeuse I used in the skirt.  This is for the Stashbusting Challenge and fits with the February challenge, which is to make something for someone you love.  This is for my best friend, Jo, who travelled down here for my birthday and flew home the very next day, which was her birthday.