Skirt Full of Stars

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

They gazed out from the hilltop, glinting sparks of tension in the warm, muggy darkness. He was pondering the constellations of street lamps and headlights below, forming a halo-ed suburban universe. There, a galaxy of lights around the high school and its football field, here a far off alien outpost at the end of a distant cul-de-sac. “It looks like a starry night today,” she said wryly from the passenger seat. She was hoping to sound joking, nonchalant, though her fingers were digging into the cracked leather, flexed and ready for rapid movement. “Should we make a wish?” The actual stars and galaxies were hiding of course behind the ever-present curtain of smog that always descended over the course of an evening and sat steady till sunrise. Most of the adults in town considered it a natural phenomenon, some quirk of physics unique to their location. Yet he’d traveled the world, and was starting to wonder…

“No wishes, let’s just go. It’s time.”

“Where?”

“I told you, somewhere we can see the stars.”

Top: Express

Skirt: Leaf & Crown

(laser cut at The Build Shop)

Shoes: Jessica Simpson

Jewelry: Boyajian Trend Gallery + Thrifted

Photography: Maya Jaycox

Styling: Dina Arrieta

Mood: Coldplay, wine, and a Star Trek hangover

 

BEHIND THE SCENES:

This skirt was a lot of fun to make, and my first foray into doing laser cut clothing for the blog. Laser cutting is awesome! Seriously, I can just throw my fabric in a machine that literally vaporizes it it specific places with a high level of precision?! Be still, my heart! Oh wait, before that there’s the whole having to create the vector art, do the necessary patterning, and make sure you’re not using a material that will vaporize into something deadly. It’s all quite space-age and exciting, so naturally I’ve been inspired to start all manner of laser-cut projects!

For this project, it was actually meant to be a mock-up so I simply grabbed some white cotton I had lying around and started a skirt vector pattern in Inkscape. It’s a 6-panel almost-circle skirt, just because of the amount of material I had and the size of the laser cutter bed. I figured it would end up having plenty of fullness and ran with it, letting the CO2 laser do all the cutting of the pattern pieces and little star cut outs, before cleaning a galaxy’s-worth of little cotton stars off the laser cutter bed. While it does save you time to cut pattern pieces on the laser cutter, the clean-up, set-up, and costs are factors to keep in mind. I really only recommend it if you’re trying for a cool effect like I was or need some extremely precise cutting that is difficult to achieve by hand. Once I got the pieces home, I sewed the skirt up, added a waistband and back zip, and finished it with an enclosed hem. Easy-peasy.

Obviously this pattern ends up having star-shaped holes all over the place, and thus isn’t completely wearable as-is, but I intend to treat it as a mock-up and create some new skirts that have another layer. They’ll be showing up in my Etsy store later in the summer, so keep an eye out and follow me on Instagram for the latest updates.

Stay tuned for more laser cut clothes in the future!