Patchwork circle skirt

A little while ago I decided to make my 6 year old daughter a skirt. She loves all things swirly so we chose a tiered circle skirt with an elasticated waist; I figured that would be relatively straight forward and forgiving in terms of technical skill, and should end up with the requisite flounciness in the end.

Hunting for instructions as to how to get the lengths of each tier right, I came across this pattern, on Indietutes and like a fool I thought, "Hey, that looks pretty. I could do that!" 

Full instructions: http://indietutes.blogspot.co.uk/2007/05/patchwork-circle-skirt.html

Noting her comment that "It will take much longer to sew the last layer versus the first, but I'm thinking that if you've gotten this far, you won't be giving up" I decided to do fewer layers than her, and to use larger squares, so we ended up with 4 rows of 5" squares (including seam allowances).

  
I chose a mix of fabrics from my stash, more or less obeying the instruction to try and use similar weights of fabric, and otherwise being guided by what my daughter chose. She stood next to me at the sewing machine, passing me each new square to add to the strips as I sewed them. Looking at the finished article, it seems a shame we had so little of the bright pink, and that I didn't manage to distribute the three squares we had more evenly!

The gathering part was the most time-consuming, and I have to say it will be a while before I next willingly embark on something that ends up with a bottom tier roughly 4 metres long! But, as Indietutes foresaw, I wasn't about to give up at that point, so I battled on, dividing the length in quarters and gathering them up that way, using hundreds of pins before I machine sewed the whole length. 

This project has also allowed me to make friends with my trusty little sewing machine again. It's never been the same since I tried to hem a pair of cords 4 years ago, broke the needle and jammed the engine (resulting in a repair job that cost almost as much as a new machine). This time it managed even the thicker seams around the waistband so I feel like we're on good terms again, Janome and I.

Only trouble is, now my 2 year old wants a swirly skirt too...

Arboretum art - Andy Goldsworthy

Last weekend we headed back to that old favourite haunt, the Harcourt Arboretum, to see how it looks now autumn is beginning to encroach. We found some wonderful fungi:

 

And beautiful colours in the leaves:

These were exactly what I was looking for, since I'd persuaded my children that they'd really love to collect a whole heap of beautifully coloured autumn leaves and help to make an Andy Goldsworthy style work of art.

They happily embraced the idea of collecting things, but were apparently not listening to the more precise elements of the brief, so we ended up with a less uniform collection of leaves than I had envisaged. That’ll teach me to be a perfectionist and then ask children to help me! We headed for the rather fabulous new barn and began to sort out our motley array of leaves, to see what we could make of it.

I had visions of beautiful concentric rings of perfectly uniform leaves, but actually I think the more varied texture provided by the different shapes and sizes is rather appealing. And I like to think that the individually placed leaves radiating out make it much more dramatic than the original central circle would have been on its own. (Though I must credit my husband with that idea, since by then I was being grumpy because our children had bounced off together to dig up stones in a rather fine patch of mud they'd found, and were no longer interested in my grand artistic creation...)

There's more about the barn here and here if you’re interested (scroll down to the bottom for the bit about building the barn) - it really is a beautiful structure. 

And the rest of the Arboretum is in pretty fine form too. This is the Lime walk - still looking fabulously green:

Do you have any good recommendations for outdoor art with children? Or for holding their attention to the end? (Maybe waiting till they're older will work on this one!)