Amy Butler Love Video Skirt... Two Generations Later

I watched this movie made by Amy Butler Designs many moons ago and fell in love with this beautiful skirt. It was made out of 5 or 6 different fabrics from Amy Butler's line of fabric, Love. The things is that there is no pattern for it. I asked Amy Butler herself if there was ever a pattern for it. She told me no. She said that someone on her staff made it up for the video. I wanted it badly enough that I used the formula for pi and figured out a pattern myself. When you lay it on the floor, it makes a perfect circle. So it took a LOT of fabric because I had to cut huge triangles out of big sections of fabric, leaving mostly unusable but large scraps. It cost me $70 to buy the fabric to make it.

I completed the skirt (all but hemming it) and found that I had measured myself a little wrong so it was a size too big, and even if it hadn't been, I knew I would never wear it. It is just too wild. I couldn't imagine myself wearing it to church. I would feel sort of like a gypsy. Or I thought people might think that I had really gone overboard with my fabric obsession. You know, I think those of us who immerse ourselves in the modern quilting fabric world tend to forget how normal people wear and use mostly basic looking textiles. These large, beautiful prints are more for accents than for the whole enchilada. So I decided that I would just hang it up and look at it but never actually complete it or wear it. Sort of a waste of money.

So then I was at Material Girls Quilt Shop and saw this cute skirt pattern. Notice how it is modeled on teenagers? Maybe that was for a reason. It is the Hippy Chick No. 19 Stripwork Skirt Pattern by Pink Fig. Well, I thought it was a sign when I saw that the skirt was not only made of strips of fabric but of strips of fabric out of the same line as my other skirt... Love by Amy Butler. 

So I decided to make the skirt on the left, the classic. So I took my $70 skirt and cut it down into rectangles, leaving even more useless scraps to add to my pile. I attached the strips and then added the waist band and elastic on top. I put it on... all excited... and guess what??!! It was a disaster. I happen to have hips and the grown-up size 8 was super poofy, using lots of fabric strips. It was so unflattering. My husband agreed that it was not suitable AT ALL. What another waste. But I was not done yet.

I made a cute A-line skirt eventually, as you can see from the picture above, I have been actually wearing my creation this time.

 In the end, I took the strips to complete the bottom portion of an A-line skirt. There is no rhyme or reason to the strips.

You get something a little different with each angle of the skirt.

But I like the result. These pictures are after I had washed the skirt and hadn't ironed it yet. So sorry for the wrinkles, but you get the idea. This is probably the most fabric consuming A-line skirt in history. Of course cutting the hippy skirt down to the A-line skirt left a bunch more unusable scraps. But at least I have finally made something that I will wear. And I have for sure noticed that compliments come from my fabric loving friends. Perhaps everyone else thinks I am crazy. What do you think? Oh, and I threw a block print of Joel Dewberry's in too. It is the bright pink one just to give credit where credit is due.