A skirt made from another skirt

While my niece is here we've been making her lot's of clothes, and heres another one! At some point during the 90's my mum made herself a very large long skirt. Then after having made the skirt she cut a good 30 cm's off the bottom of the skirt before she wore it. The left over piece of skirt was hemmed and had 8 curved panels in it, because there was so much fabric, I cut along the hem and seams (instead of unpicking - I hate unpicking!) and overlocked and stitched 5 of the pieces back together again. Technically I could have saved myself time and just left the seams as they were, but I prefer the look of overlocked edges to zigzag, and this way all the parts will look the same. I used the remaining panels to cut out pieces of frill and sewed them together. I then began using a gathering stitch on my overlocker along the entire frill, which looked really long but gathered up almost perfectly to the size of the skirt (after fiddling around for hours with the settings to get it to do semi decently gathered stitch). It turns out the manual apparently has the wrong settings for the needle tensions for the gathering instructions. grrr!
Luckily it turned out great, it's one of those projects that could have gone either way but would have probably ended up in the "Later pile"if I hadn't persisted.

Again I made a fabric flower using a tutorial from Wise Craft because my niece really loved the last one. I again added a vintage button from my mums button jar and this time, some new organza ribbons. I love these fabric flowers. After they've been washed a few times and start to fray and curl they get a whole lot more character that I love!

If it weren't for Police Academy being the late night movie last night I may not have spent so much time trying to work out how to gather with my overlocker. Police Academy is an oldie that's for sure, but it still has the ability to make me laugh out loud and throughout all the fiddling and test stitching with the overlocker I needed some laughing! For those with this overlocker, Janome Harmony 9102D The settings I finally used were : Left Needle Thread Tension Dial set to 9. The Right Needle Thread Tension Dial set to 9. Upper and Lower Looper Thread Tension Dials set to 3. The stitch length dial set to 4. The Differential feed dial set to the next mark past the 2 (the book calls it 2.2) and the Needle plate setting knob set to S. But please if anyone knows if there is a more correct way to gather using this overlocker please let me know!