Twirl Your Skirt Challenge: A Design Project

Nothing makes a girl of any age feel more girly than the swish of fabric swinging around her knees or the twirl of textiles as she moves through daily life in her fave skirt. And when that skirt is made from a luscious new fabric, such as the tissue-thin voiles and dainty lawns now hitting the shelves, that skirt climbs the fashion ladder a few notches from fun to fabulous!

Well, we’re going to give you a chance to show us your fabulousness with the Twirl Your Skirt Challenge sponsored by Generation Q Magazine and supported by Connecting Threads. Connecting Threads just released Matsuri, a luscious line of cotton lawn designed by Jenny Calo. There are six prints—all spring-ish—in several colorways, including the so-hot turquoise and coral. (Go here to see the Matsuri collection.) Don’t they just scream “Design with me!”?  We decided to listen.

The Twirl Your Skirt Challenge will be a limited project involving just a few aspiring designers who are drooling to work with the cotton lawn and show us their skirt mojo. We’re thinking a field five stitchers, two of whom we’ll hand-pick, but we also wanted to open up the challenge to a select few serious Q-Bies who’d like to have their way with Connecting Threads’ lawn and maybe start their own line of sewing patterns.

Here’s how this will work:

• Designers will create an original ADULT skirt using their choice of prints from Connecting Threads’ Matsuri collection.
• Connecting Threads will supply specific cuts of those lawns to the designers.
• Only the lawn from the collection can be used in the skirt (although lining may be used)
• Designers can use embellishments, notions and trims of their choice

Here’s the cool stuff: If your pattern is picked by our readers as their fave, we’ll help you publish the pattern through GenQ, help you promote it and yourself as the awesome designer you obviously are, provide you one free 1/4 page advertisement for your new business in GenQ print/digital edition and give you a selection of stuff to support your new career (books, sewing tools, fabric).

Now, you can’t rush greatness. So if you’re serious about wanting to play along, give us a shout at to Melissa at melissa@generationqmagazine.com. Send us a sketch to show us what you might be thinking (but your actual entry can vary, of course). We’ll announce our cast of designers by May 1, and images of finished skirts will be due June 15.

Meanwhile, the rest of us can always find a great existing pattern to bare our legs with. Here are just a few of our favorites

Serendipity Studio’s graceful Francesa Skirt

Amy Butler’s classic Barcelona Skirt

Patty Young/Modkid’s sassy Juliana Skirt