Hippie patchwork layering skirt

My sister in law sent me some links to various hippie-type clothing, asking if I thought I could do anything like that.  I didn't have enough of any one piece of material on hand to make her any of the skirts she sent me, but I had a lot of scraps left over from various diaper-making projects (I use natural fabrics for my diapering, which are the same types of fabrics usually used in this style of clothing).  I was so excited to try out the idea in my head, I had to get started right then.

Most of my scraps looked something like this, so I squared off all sides and then made various angular cuts from there, piecing it all back together with the machine.

 I decided to do a sort of free-form patchwork using both hemp and bamboo fleece.  I pieced things together with the jersey side out (hemp and bamboo fleece come with a jersey side and a fleece side), so you can see the angles and lines of the shapes better.  I topstiched on either side of every seam to give it more of a quilted look.  I basically just kept adding strips of pieced scraps to the main body of what would become the skirt.  Once I felt like I had the main body large enough to where it would wrap around as a skirt, I squared off all four edges and sewed it into a tube.

I used the fleece side of one long scrap for the hem and did a rough hemming along the bottom edge.

The only continuous scrap in my stash long enough for a waistband was bamboo velour.  As it turned out, I like how it contrasted and the velour is super stretchy, so it works well as a waistband.  And when the velour was dyed, it had a really cool almost metalic effect contrasting with the flat jersey.  I cut the waistband strip shorter than what the main skirt was, then stretched it as I sewed to bring the top of the skirt at an angle.  If that makes sense?  I should have cut a shorter strip, but I didn't pay attention to how large things were until the end and found the skirt to be a little bigger than my sister in law would need.

 Lesson learned: pay attention/measure more as I go.

I dyed the skirt after completing most of it.  I had planned on lining it with a muslin, but I didn't want to take away from the stretchy comfort of the skirt.  So I trashed the muslin lining idea after dying it to match.  If you need a cool steel grey piece of muslin, let me know.

just out of the dye bath

I really love how the piecing turned out.  I want to make something else using this same technique.  It was time consuming, but really fun to see it all come together. Also, using so many scraps that I had laying around by making them into something "real" was incredibly gratifying.