A skirt of shirts

I probably found out about Gibbous clothing more than six years ago, and kept telling myself I would try to make something in the style since then. I even had a box set aside to collect color coordinated fabric scraps and clothes I didn't need anymore so I had materials when I finally got around to it.

During this past winter, I saw a girl dancing in a similarly styled skirt at a party and I kept thinking about it. Dammit I was going to make one!

I pulled out that box of fabric, then spent a night doing a lot of pinning, sewing, and twirling, and here's the resulting skirt!

To make it, I roughly cut out a yoke from one of my scraps and lined it with some denim since it needed to support the whole skirt. While sewing the yoke I sandwiched some old shirt sleeves in between the lining and outer fabric to use as ties. Next I started pinning pieces to the yoke on my dress form, trying to balance the left and right side without making them symmetrical. After pinning a couple pieces I would sew them down, then add more until I liked how it looked. Once all the loose pieces were on, I finished with the strip of lace and the shredded fabric over the yoke.

I sewed lines randomly over the yoke section to keep everything together. The outermost layer is a knit fabric, so when I slashed it between the stitching it rolled  at the edges and created this effect:

You can see some burgundy fabric with a sort of paisley design on the ends in the photo below. I really liked the print on this fabric (it also has sequins embroidered onto it) but I hated the fit of the skirt it came from. Also, the lace strip is from a comforter I had as a kid. I'm glad I could finally incorporate both of these into something I'll wear.

A lot of my fabrics were shirts, so I have some neat details like this pocket, and the buttons on the front (though they don't really close anymore). Many of the shirts were linen, so the skirt wrinkles like mad, but I think I'm ok with that in this case.

(I had a horrible time trying to find a shirt to wear with this. Guess I'll have to make a matching crop top!)

One more action shot to show how twirly it is:

This skirt turned out pretty fun to sew even though I had put it off for so long. It was nice to not care much about everything being perfectly symmetrical, hemmed neatly, etc. I'd like to make more of them, but I might have to recruit some people to donate clothes and wear the resulting skirts...