Have you seen my skirt of many colours?

I get some raised eyebrows for my fashion sense, but wearing bright colours and prints makes me happy. I think it's important to like the clothes that you put on each day, because it puts you in a better mind set and as a result you'll be more productive.

Looking down at my work clothes now, sitting at home at the end of the day, I still smile. This skirt in particular brightens my day - it's also a bright spot in the day of anyone who interacts me, because it can't be avoided!

A few years ago, when I lived in a more regional area, I crossed the river and visited the Injalak Arts Centre a few times. Like many of my posts and clothes feature, this is an Aboriginal Arts and Craft workshop and store in the Northern Territory. I bought two pieces of fabric that I absolutely loved but didn't know what to do with. 

I ended up turning them into archery bow bags, just simple draw-string ones, as I didn't have anything else to store my equipment in at the time. Now this fabric was probably far too expensive for this purpose, but I believe in using things rather than letting them languish in boxes, slowly fading.

But I got a different bag for my bow, and this fabric did go in a box for a couple of years until I pulled it out again last year. 

It's a great print, with crocodiles, turtles and eels. I also love that it has variegated paint - a wash of colours. I'm very fond of wearable art.

It was a rectangle, about 1.2 x 1.5 metres, and I wanted to make it into a skirt. I folded it into a cone-shape and cut a hole in the middle. This is the basic design for a handkerchief skirt.

This gave me a shape like this:

I put a zip in the back, on one of the long edges, and used binding tape on the top edge to seal it. It also had a jersey stretch waistband, my favourite trick at the moment.

And then oops... when I pulled it on, the short sides were too short!

I only had the small piece of hole fabric left, so I needed to add something. I thought about putting triangles on the short sides, but thought it would look too odd.

I decided on another row of fabric instead (I apologise for my dodgy little drawings).

What would go with the skirt fabric though? I pulled lots of things out of my fabric stash, but with that pale purple and all of the other colours nothing worked!

When I had four boxes worth of fabric strewn across the table, chairs, bench and couch in a rage I finally spotted a plastic bag full of something that was a pretty crazy idea...

When I go to art fairs and print shops, I ask if they have fabric off-cuts for sale. Often you can get a bag of scraps, with prints on them, for $10-$20. This gives you a store of decent-sized pieces that can be used for patches, pockets, features and patchwork. I had quite a collection, from three or four different print workshops, IN ALL DIFFERENT COLOURS! Sometimes inspiration hits me in the strangest ways, and it all works out for the best. 

I laid a few out against the skirt fabric and decided that it would work. But I would need three rows on the short sides to add enough length, and a matching row on the long sides so that it didn't look funny.

Rather than painstakingly matching each and every piece, I just started sewing them together until I had enough in a row, making sure that I didn't have too many greens together, etc. Not all the scraps were suitable, as I wanted them to be a uniform height.

I overlocked every single seam. It was very time consuming. 

But when I sewed the rows onto the skirt and hemmed the bottom it was definitely worth the effort!

I call this my Crazy Rainbow Skirt!

I wore it for a couple of months and found that the four points of the rectangle were dragging on the ground. Rather than chop it off, I just folded the points up and stitched them down.

If I had cut them off, the inner seams would have shown when the skirt swayed. This way they didn't.

A common comment that I get is 'I couldn't wear something like that!', and my response generally is, 'Why not?'