During quarantine, I think it’s safe to say a lot of us have taken to our creature comforts. My weakness has always been wine – I love coming home from a long day to a beautiful glass of cab sauv, kicking off my heels and sharing my day with my Mister. Now that we’re home all day, there are no shoes to kick off and Mr. D already knows the happs because…well…he was there. But, there is still that perfect glass of wine….
So, it was only a matter of time before the vino inspired a skirt. Awhile back, I had seen a grape-themed Marjorie Montgomery on the feed of one of my San Diego haunts The Girl Can’t Help It, and then spied it again on one of my favorite IGers, Rose. Having not yet managed to get my hands on a vintage original, I was ready to flex my creative muscles once again and head on down to the grapevine…
The Inspiration
If you know me, you know I have a love affair with fruit-themed clothing. I have no explanation for why I find life-imitating-food so charming, but to each their own, right? Perhaps one of the reasons why I love appliqué so much is that it often appeared in fruit form in the 1950’s and 60’s.
So, the wheels started turning and I started to sketch my next project. Some would be returning to familiar techniques, some would be new, and a LOT would be sparkly….
Photo Credit: The Girl Can’t Help It
The Design
As Julie Andrews says, “let’s start at the very beginning.” And the beginning of any sewing project is always in fabric. I knew I wanted a cool green base with a slightly different shade for the lining.
After poring over the various options on my swatch card, I decided to go with Green Tea Kona Cotton for the base – a beautiful warm tone green with some olive undertones – and a slightly lighter Honey Dew Kona Cotton for the lining.
I knew I wanted to build the grapes myself from multiple circles. I opted to order circles out of felt in two different sizes (1.25″ and 0.75″) from BBD supplies. Because I wanted to be sure my grapes had depth and dimension, I decided to play with multiple tones of purple and got the two sizes in shades of purple rain (x50), grape jelly (x50), purple (x25), lavender (x25), field of lilacs (x25)
I also snapped up some purple glitter felt, which I would cut on my Cricut to get in some much needed bling (what can I say? My magpie tendencies almost always win).
I also planned to cut the leaves myself – after hemming and hawing over the various green shades of wool blend felt, I went with an old favorite Grassy Meadows. It would pop really well against the Green Tea shade of the cotton and would compliment the various shades of purple in the grapes.
For the vines of the grapes, I went back and forth between several different types of materials. For prior projects, I cut thin strips of felt to create vines and stems. But I knew for the degree of curls and whirls I wanted for these vines, the felt just wasn’t going to work. Luckily I found the perfect solution in rattail cord – a shiny string made from satin embroidery.
Although I went back and forth between several shades, I found the perfect olive green rattail cord from Blackbird Glass. With my materials set, it was time to get sewing!
To recreate this skirt, you will need:
The Construction
Step 1: I needed to create the circle skirt on which to sew my design. Circle skirts are fairly easy to measure out, with one inner circle (that is your waist circumference) and one larger circle (that is your hem). I quickly drafted one to to my waist circumference (4.5″ radius = 28″ finished waist) and my ideal hem length (28″ + 4.5″ = 32.5″ outer radius).
Using those measurements, I cut out one half circle and two quarter circles out of the Green Tea Kona Cotton and stitched them up at the side seams and up the back seam, leaving a 9″ gap for the zipper. If you aren’t as familiar with the geometry behind making a circle skirt, check out this post for a more detailed walk through.
I started with the focal point: which would be the bunches of grapes. For this, I was going to build the bunches using all of my circles in various shades of purple. To compliment my existing circles, I also cut some additional 1.25″ ones out of the purple glitter felt.
With some photos up on my laptop for inspiration, I started to create the grapes from the felt circles, keeping the colors fairly random. I would start at the base, and build up until I had a shape that resembled the juiciest bunch of grapes you ever did see.
I fell into a quick rhythm after my first bunch of grapes and made 6 others, curving the fruit from the front and down to the right side of the skirt, with a single bunch on the left and on the back.
N ow that the grapes were in place, I needed to roughly sketch the placement for my grapevines, which I prefer to do using a water-soluble pen. Luckily, I had photos of the original Marjorie Montgomery piece, which I put up in front of me and used as inspiration to loosely sketch the shape of the vines.
In the meantime of grape-building and vine drawing, I had also put my Cricut to work cutting out grape leaves. I opted to cut leaves in two different sizes . The best thing about Cricut (other than the fact that it cuts perfect replicates for my extensive applique projects), is that it can work away in the background, so I have pieces ready right when I need them.
In Design Space, I found the perfect grape leaf shape (Cut File #M1C87B561). I sized them to 3.5″ and 2.5″ width and cut out ~25 of each size. Then, I rolled out the Grassy Meadows felt and let Cricut get to work. She whizzed and whirred away in the background cutting the perfect leaves to bring my grapevine to life.
Once they were cut, I busied myself placing them along my vines and on top of my bunches of grapes. Again, I tried to keep the placement pretty random, with a mix of the two sizes until I had something that looked reasonably lifelike. Then, I pinned everything in place and put her on my dress form to be sure I was happy with the placement.
Remember: you can always adjust at this stage. What is MUCH more of a pain is to have to undo things once you start to sew them down. Check, check, and check again….
With the leaves and grapes in place, next was the tricky part: the vines. These needed to be placed along the swirls and lines I had drawn, and needed to arc in a realistic way. However, inorganic materials very rarely ever want to do as you demand of them. In this case, however, I chose my materials really well. The rat tail cording was happy to loop and curve and give me the vine shape I wanted.
So, treating each bunch of grapes as its own vignette, I cut my rattail to length and laid it on top of the lines I had drawn, pinning it in place as I went. One thing with this cording: it’s very happy to make looping shapes. It is however NOT happy to hold them. But, working slowly and carefully around the skirt, I snipped and pinned and watched the vines grow and twist
Before I could go any further, I had to get these elements stitched in place. This was going to be a bit of an adventure, as I knew I couldn’t use the same techniques for each element. The first hurdle I focused on was getting the grapes secured. In this case, I opted to use a mixture of my very favorite fabric glue (which comes in a handy pen), and some hand sewing.
Because the grapes were made up of so many elements, I started by adding spots of glue at key points to secure the circles to one another. I would hand sew as well, but this would keep things relatively secure so that I wouldn’t lose any circles in the meantime. For this, I would carefully lift up one edge of a circle, add a bead of glue, and move on to the next. I repeated this for each circle, and then let it overnight to dry.
Once the glue was try, I used some purple thread and sewed around the outer perimeter of each bunch with tight, tiny backstitches. I also sewed down any of the circles that had somehow escaped my glue. One I was happy that nary a grape would be lost, I moved on to the next bunch.
Next up: leaves. These would be relatively straightforward. I worked one leaf at a time, securing each in place with a backstitch. In places where the leaves draped over the leaf bunches, I didn’t stitch all the way around the leaf. This way, they would flutter a bit as I moved and give more dimension to the design.
I knew the cording would be a bit trickier. I tested a few different techniques, but in the end opted to hand sew because I needed a lot of control over my cording, which was twisted and twirled quite a lot for this project; but if you want to machine sew, there is a great tutorial on couching (or sewing on cording) here.
However, I didn’t have the required foot for my machine to do this (and also knew it would be really tricky to navigate around all of my curves). But, if you have all of the right tools and want to save a ton of time, this is a great technique to check out. I may use it on future projects that have fewer loops and swirls.
Although I have no idea if this is the “right” way, from my tests I found this to work the best for this project. I would bring up my thread on one side of the cording and push the needle through the middle, to the opposite side, before bringing it down through the fabric again. I would repeat this at 0.5″ intervals, all along the cord.
I found this method to secure the cord in place, while keeping the stitches mostly invisible. It also gave me a lot of flexibility on the smaller loops, which I was able to stitch down while keeping their shape.
There were several junctures where vines were growing out of other vines. For these, I would secure them with a dot of fabric glue, leaving a bit of overhang. After everything was stitched in place, I snipped the end flush with the other vine.
As a final step to prevent fraying, I added a dab of Fray Check to the ends of each piece of cording. I wanted to be sure that once this beauty was done, she wasn’t going to unravel on me…
Although it was definitely a time commitment, the extra care that I put into the hand sewing was worth it. Before I knew it, the grapevines were all stitched in place and the skirt started to resemble the vineyard in my head.
Speaking of vineyards, I knew something was missing from this lovely scene I had created. Although it wasn’t in the original, you know I like to add a bit of extra to every project I make. To me, a grapes skirt would be incomplete without some wine. I knew I wanted a wine bottle and a full glass of the finest vintage resting against it.
For this, I turned to Cricut once again. I had plenty of felt scraps leftover from previous projects to bring this idea to life. Starting with the wine glass (#MB29F7C9 in Design Space), I cut the shape out of a scrap of silver metallic felt from BBD Supplies.
Then, using the wineglass shape as a guide, I cut out some wine out of bordeaux-hued felt I had in my stash, making sure I had given myself a generous pour. I cut it out with my rotary cutter and added an oval to the top to give it a more realistic quality. After ensuring the shape was how I wanted it, used my fabric glue to secure it to the silver felt.
For the wine bottle, I cut the bottle shape on Cricut (#M8EAA54E in Design Space) and then freehand cut a label for the top, taking care to curve the edges. With my fabric glue, I secured the label to the bottle.
Now, Mr. Dressed app often wanders past my creations (I tend to lay them out in the foyer because it’s the only flat space in the house large enough). As he passed, he remarked, “Shaw, Vintage 2010.” (aka our wedding anniversary). Now, although I may be facing copyright infringement from Charles, Shaw Wines in the Shaw Household was officially born.
With some leftover purple glitter felt, I hand cut out S, H, A, and W in block letters.
Then, I added a bit of glue to the back of each letter, and pressed them into place on the label at a diagonal. As a few finishing touches, I added a cap from the silver felt and a bit of shading to the label. It was seriously way too cute…
I placed the bottle onto the skirt at the end of one of the vines. Then, I put the wineglass next to it, tilting it just slightly, as if she’d had imbibed just a little too much (who hasn’t in this pandemic, amiright??). Then I pinned both in place and got ready for my final bit of applique!
As with my leaves, I secured the bottle an the top of the wineglass with matching thread and tiny, tight backstitches. Then, because it was so narrow, I opted to glue the stem of the wineglass down so as not to risk splintering the felt.
I was so happy I added this extra detail – it was the perfect finishing touch.
At long last, we came to the final fishes. After quickly attaching the lining at the waist (in my Honey Dew Kona Cotton), then it was a matter of cutting and sewing in the waistband and stitching in the zip! I went with a 9″ vintage green metal zipper that I had in my stash that matched the cotton perfectly.
I know I say this in every one of my sewing posts, but if you struggle with zips, I highly recommend watching Gertie’s AMAZING zipper tutorial. I quickly got the zipper in place and moved on to the waistband.
For this skirt, I wanted an extra wide waistband. So, I quickly cut two long 4″ by 32″ rectangles out of the the Green Tea Kona Cotton and a matching strip of interfacing. I backed the waistband with interfacing and stitched the waistband and waistband lining together, pressing the seam flat.
With right sides together, I sewed the waistband to the skirt and the lining, and then pressed it upwards. Last steps were to attach two clasps at the waistband, secure the hem with a quick slip stitch, and press in my personal finishing touch: my custom made labels from Heart of Wonder!
And then, the juiciest, most fermented skirt was complete! I was so excited to see how so many small elements could come together to make something so charming. I definitely deserved a glass of wine after this one…
The Debut
With few places to go in the pandemic, I ended up wearing this cutie for the first time to my one and only trip to the Dr. this past year. Never one to worry about being “too dressed up” (no such thing!), I fully went for it and gave the nurses quite the stir when I swooshed in all crinolines and sparkle for a simple checkup.
Wine is sunlight, held together by water
Galileo
I came home and definitely toasted myself for a skirt well done – I couldn’t be happier with how it turned out. As usual, whenever I create a new garment based on a true vintage piece, I always end up being the most enamored with the extra elements I add. The few glitter circles in the grapes that catch the light. The personalized wine bottle. The bit of me that I hope will live on in this piece.
I can feel pieces of me that got pushed aside starting to return this week. Things have definitely quieted down over here now that summer has officially started. I still have a To Do list that’s a mile long, but the sense of panicked urgency has diffused. Much like that feeling you get after you’ve had a nice glass of wine. Things go just fuzzy around the edges. The world still exists, but somehow seems a bit easier to manage.
Toasting to all of us for surviving this past year!
xoxo
Construction Details:
Circle Skirt: Self-drafted
Skirt fabric: Robert Kaufman Green Tea Kona Cotton
Lining fabric: Robert Kaufman Honey Dew Kona Cotton
Appliqué: Felt and Felt circles from BBD Supplies
Rattail Cord: Blackbird Glass
Additional notions (thread, marking pen): JoAnn’s
Outfit Details:
Top: White House Black Market (similar)
Skirt: Made by me!
Necklace: Kashuen
Belt: Natalie Attired (similar)
Handbag: Wildfell Hall Vintage (similar)
Shoes: Poetic License (similar here & here)
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Any items marked with a “c/o” (courtesy of) a retailer mean I was provided with an item for free in exchange for a review and/or feature on my blog. I always provide my honest opinion of any item I’m reviewing, regardless of whether it was sent to me as a courtesy item or if I purchased it myself. In addition, this post may contain affiliate links. This means that if you click and/or make a purchase through certain links or ads on this site, I may make a commission from that click and/or purchase at no cost to you, which helps with the day-to-day running costs of my blog.