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She Sells Seashells

A neck-to-knees photo of a young white woman in a black t-shirt and a white skirt with suspenders. Her hands are stuffed in the large pockets to the forearms, and the blue shell-outline print shows fainter than the red topstitching on the pockets and waistband. She's in front of a display of neat bolts of fabric.
Even with heavy image editing, this is pretty yellow compared to the actual fabric.
I decided to force this pattern into 45" fabric, which you could very easily do with no mishaps if you were to use nondirectional fabric. Unfortunately, I did it with a print that is strongly unidirectional, so I ended up with a counterchanged design situation. The left half of the skirt has shells facing down, with upturned shells on the pocket, and the right half is just the reverse.

A shot down the crowded aisle of a fabric store, slightly obscured by fabric draping off bolts on the left, showing a young white woman with long, braided red hair, inspecting stacked bolts of thick fabric. She's wearing a black t-shirt and white suspender skirt with a faint blue-outlined shell pattern and large pockets topstitched in red.
Petting the pretty wools I can't afford yet.
I've decided it's charming.

A close-up of the edge of a piece of white fabric with blue outlined seashells on it, showing two separate pieced-in sections with the patterns carefully matched.
Literally the most excessively picky piecing I've ever done.
I didn't realize I'd cut the pockets so they would match their respective sides, so had to recut them to create the counterchangeyness, but didn't have big enough scraps to accomplish that perfectly, so pieced the one that got shorted, except I didn't have a scrap with the pattern in the right place to fully piece it, and then I got nervous about leaving the pocket with a big chunk of the seam allowance missing, since it's a patch pocket and I'm prone to filling my pockets with heavy objects, so I pieced it again and once again fussed over getting the pattern to match well.

It was kind of an ordeal, but the finished pocket is pretty nice.

A single pocket attached to a skirt piece, both in white fabric with blue seashell outlines. The pocket is a curvy swoosh, with red decorative stitching echoing the outlines and down the center.
I am very pleased with all my decorative stitching.
I also added a variety of stitches instead of the very demure two lines of running stitch the pattern calls for; there are tiny false pearls centered in the chains of the upper decorative line, plus a plain chainstitched line and a split stitch line just outside it, and I tried very hard to do neat backstitching on the topstitched lines at the edges.

The front panel of a skirt with big swoosh-shaped patch pockets, in white fabric with blue seashell outlines. Half the skirt has the pattern right side up, and the other half has it upside down, with the pockets opposite their respective sides. The red topstitching on the pockets shows up especially well.
It kinda looks like something.
Look upon my works, ye mighty, and despair, for I have never yet obeyed pattern instructions and I'm not about to start now. Besides, flipping the design is kind of fun.

A button placket pattern drawn out in pencil on the back of a scrap of white fabric with blue-outlined shells printed all over it.
This took a lot of scrutinizing a placket design and guessing.
The pattern also calls for a zipper, but A. I don't want to buy more plastic things if I can help it and B. I hate setting zippers, so instead I drafted a button placket along the lines of the ones used on shirt sleeves, crammed it into the largest remaining scrap I had (where it just fit), and crossed my fingers.

A button placket stitched to a skirt, showing raw edges going every which way and propped up by a hand with a heavily bandaged finger.
Don't do it this way.
I also overthought it a bit; the instructions I was following (which are fabulous) are for a placket inserted into a solid piece of fabric. In trying to arrange my separate halves of skirt and the placket so all the edges would be contained in the end, I actually ensured that the raw skirt edges remained visible.

By the time I figured this out, I'd cut the slit in the placket piece, and didn't much feel like picking it apart again and delicately sewing it back in place, hoping not to distort it or fray it too much. So I just have some very weird seam finishes at the back.

A close-up of the point of a finished button placket in white fabric with an allover print of blue seashell outlines, showing the blue backstitching detail around the edges of the placket and on some of the detail lines in the shell nestled into the point.
S A T I S F Y I N G
The tail end of the placket landed beautifully on the point of a shell, though, and it happened to be one of the shells with horizontal detailing, so I backstitched along the printed design to anchor and enclose all the fuss and bother at the tail of the placket.

A close-up of two finished buttonholes in blue thread on white blue-outlined shell patterned fabric. A bit of red chain stitching shows along the top edge of the waistband.
Functional!
And then I just had to stitch buttonholes and buttons, and topstitch the suspenders. None of this was terribly time-consuming work, but it took about two weeks longer than I'd meant it to.

And then it took me another week or two to write about it all. Feh. 

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