the skirt that cured my mental illness

A series of cascading events lead to the creation of this skirt.

Firstly, my grandmother passed away in the summer of 2019, leading me to helping clear out her basement and unearthing a 70s sewing room time capsule. She had apparently sewied consistently from the late 60s to the early 80s when she all of a sudden gave up and threw everything haphazardly into crates and bags. I found so many dodgy fabric scraps and loose tissue pattern pieces shoved into drawers. I salvaged what I could and placed the decent ones on my etsy shop. What’s relevant to this project, however, was the piles of classic 70s polyester knit scraps.

Next, I quit my job. During my grandmother’s funeral, as we were celebrating this very important woman in our family, I realized how this week of family connection was a breath of fresh air amidst the monotony of my daily life. I hated my job. My weeks were spent wasting my time until the weekend for a few hours of living for myself. My creative energy was spent creating new ways to waste time at work while still appearing productive. It turns out IT support was not my calling. With encouragement from my partner, I finally put in my two weeks notice in December of 2019 with big plans for a new personal creative venture and more time to spend with my family.

You can probably see where this is going. Obviously the pandemic threw a wrench in all our grand plans. I was isolated at home, no job to take my mind off things. Honestly this paragraph has taken me like a week to write because it was such a weird period of time to exist. How do you describe COVID depression? I was sad and stuck inside and my size kept changing so I felt like I couldn’t make clothes anymore. And then with people dying and BLM happening I felt guilty to be sad to lose this incredibly vain hobby of mine. [I don’t have a real solution to this feeling. The world is still super messed up and people are dying and I’m in my warm studio making linen dresses for myself. Idk.]

Slowly, over several months of gardening and baking and all the cottagecore bullshit, I healed. I devoured the cottagecore and solarpunk aesthetics and watched every episode of Little House on the Prairie that I could get my grubby little paws on. I got into maxi skirts and 70s vibes in a major way. Here, the aforementioned poly knit scraps come back into play.

I unearthed my sewing table (finally tidying up mask patterns and rogue elastics) and made squares. There’s something about quilting and patchwork that is so methodical that it consumes every part of you. You can half pay attention to the episode of Little House and cut and sew bajillions of squares to each other and fully zen out. Life doesn’t exist, only square. It’s peaceful and monotonous and you can see the physical thing slowly take shape as it gets more and more unwieldy under a sewing machine. It’s awesome.

I went into this project with little to no plan, just the inspo pic above and a pile of fabric. It’s chaotic and weird, but it reminds me of my grandma and it has pockets. I need to take in the waistband, but I thought ahead a little when I was making it. There is no zipper because I knew my size would continue to change and I didn’t want this to go to waste. However, I can’t say the fabric is the most comfortable. I have to wear tights and a petticoat underneath to prevent me from feeling the rough texture (breaking news: 70s polyester is a torture fabric).

So that’s the story of my weird, slightly uncomfortable grandma skirt. It’s fun, it’s flirty, it saved my sewing life. And now we’re bringing back the 70s quilted maxi skirt (because I need to wear this more, make it trendy again).