How to sew a sheer maxi skirt like a COMPUTER SCIENTIST

In this post, I will endeavor to inform you how to sew your own sheer maxi a la Jill Sander and whatnot like the true computer scientist you are.

Because you will most certainly need one of these babies while you are spending your Friday night bathed in florescent light, staring deeply into your screen.

Oh look, an apathetic coder TRANSFORMED by a quick two hour diy.

Step One

furiously google for about 15 minutes. I ended up here and here. Assume you now know everything and forge blindly ahead.

Step Two

Gather supplies. You will need

• 2 yards of sheer (or eye-searingly bright) fabric  that when held up, drapes attractively ( I got mine for $3 from an evil corporate titan)
• enough elastic to comfortably fit around your waist (we're going to be super precise in this tutorial)
• extraordinarily sharp scissors
• a sewing machine (or just a needle and thread if you are feeling particularly masochistic) 

Step Three

Fold your fabric in half. Essentially you are drawing a bloated triangle with the top hacked off. The smaller end should be your waist size + waist size/2, and the fuller end should be proportionate to how flouncy you want your skirt to be. We need the extra fabric around the waist in order to gather it later. Here I took an old skirt that I already like and roughly traced it in order to get the length/bottom volume I wanted.

Mine worked out to be around 56 inches, since I was feeling particularly flouncy, and 40 inches at the waist. The black skirt is just a rough guideline for the shape, make sure to leave extra room at the top so there is fabric to gather!

Step Four

Pin up the sides of your skirt, and sew them with a straight seam. Actually if you want to get really meticulous you should finish all the sides of the cut fabric so they don't unravel later. I did this by using the excellent double roller foot on my sewing machine. Essentially you fold your fabric over, so the fold gets caught on the extra arm in the foot, and it does this beautiful rolled seam for you. 

You can also roll it over twice by hand and stitch it down but its more work. Use your technology!

Step 5

Fold over the top part of the skirt for a few millimeters longer than the width of your elastic. This is going to create a channel of sorts that we're going to pull the elastic through. Stitch it down with a straight seam, leaving a gap about an inch wide, preferably near one of the seams.

Step 6

Feed the elastic through your channel, gathering fabric behind it as you go. This becomes significantly easier if you attach a safety pin to the end you're threading.

Step 7

Sew the elastic together, and the gap you left in the channel. I also didn't use no flip elastic so i sewed the elastic down periodically so it wouldn't "float" or twist with wear.

Step 8

Prance around, in your finished maxi! You can now be confident that you would draw looks of envy from every street corner if you weren't at home browsing the entire xkcd archive instead of reprogramming malloc from scratch for your systems class.