If anyone is wondering, this tutorial to make this skirt is still a method that works. Both those links are from wayback machine captures from a time before Photobucket betraying us all and deleting pictures.
Yes, I'm still mad about that.
Anyway, in the spirit of seeing if budget lolita was still doable in 2023, here we go with a cost breakdown:
>Main skirt fabric was a $10 walmart 4-yard precut; enough fabric to make waist ties not pictured here
>Skirt is fully lined with a polyester bedsheet I got for $1 at a surplus store
>The bow lace was part of a bulk purchase, ended up costing 21cents a yard. Skirt probably has 6-8 yards of lace on it. The little vertical strips were scraps from another project. Back shirring on skirt is 1/4" elastic, which covid conveniently made super cheap.
>I didn't have the zipper on hand, so I had to buy one for $1 at walmart. As anyone who has been on Wawak knows, that's massively overpaying for zippers.
This skirt is 3" longer and a few sizes larger than the one in the post. I had to make a new cutting layout for the skirt, and it took a fair bit of additional fabric. In addition, to save on fabric width, the "side seams" on this are actually a little bit farther back than the side of the skirt. I cut the back of the skirt to full fabric width, and then added the adjustment for the fullness into the side front pieces. Clarice, who wrote the original tutorial, mentions that the person she made it for was very small, so I sized it up a little bit.
I make sketches like this as I go for personal reference, but maybe it'll be helpful.
In the spirit of livejournal, I "clarified" my sketch by making it more confusing in GIMP.
(Your pieces you need to cut will be back: 44"x19.5", cut 1. Side Front, 22"x19.5", cut 2. Center Front, 15"x25.5", cut 1. Frills, 5.5"x44", cut 9 or 10).
So, when we get into it, yeah, if you have a good design (or can copy a good design) and you're willing to put some time into it, you can still do a budget lolita skirt for under $20 of materials, if you're careful. I'm mostly making this post to save which archive.org captures are the ones with working pictures.
(It also helps if you don't mess up on the waistband so many times that it slowly shrinks into a 1" waistband.)
Fun fact: the trim on the ends of the waist ties may or may not be because I hemmed them sloppily and the hem came up bubbly, and zigzagging some lace onto the bottom handily covered up the bubbling. One of the advantages about knowing a decent amount about lolita fashion is that you can look at things and go, "Yeah, if I added x here, it'd be fine," and knowing enough about sewing to go, "yeah, if I do x cheat here, it'll look better" and being able to put the two together and go, "hey, if I cheat here, it'll still look lolita!" It's a good feeling.
Anyway, if anyone else has ever used Clarice's tutorial to make a skirt, I'd love to see it! This is my second time using it, but the last time was almost a decade ago at this point, and I think I've improved a lot since then.
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