Wednesday, November 20, 2013

withdrawing from the ideas bank

As you are probably aware, I have very recently finished my degree. This has meant that over the last few months I have had all these ideas stored away because all my time and creative energy was being used up by uni. That is until now. One of the ideas I have had stored away was to turn an old pair of op shop (which is a thrift store, my American friends) high waisted jeans into a denim skirt. This had the potential to go horribly wrong, but I didn't really have much to loose. Here is a little sneak peek of how it turned out.


I'm pretty pleased with the results, but before we really delve into the finished product, here is how I got there. It all started at Salvo's with a $5 pair of jeans. The things I was looking for were not too expensive (I didn't really want to go over $5 in case I ended up just destroying them), high waisted, good quality denim and no wore out patches in at least the sections above the knee. The pair I ended up going with hadn't even been wore as they still had their original Miss Shop tag on them, however they looked a few decades old.


First up was cutting open the inner leg seam right up to the bottom of the fly. I added in a yellow dotted line in Photoshop so you can better see where I mean.


I then turned the whole thing inside out and pinned the front half of the legs together and the back half of the legs together. As you can see I made sure I pinned them in a straight line rather that following the curve of the pants because this extra fabric is to form the crotch of the pants, which are obviously not necessary for a skirt. Again the yellow line should hopefully make this clearer.


Next I just cut the pants off at the knees so it was less bulky for sewing.


Next came the sewing. I simply just followed the line of pins I had. After this came the hem. Because the denim was really thick, I decided not to double roll the hem, but if you wanted to do it all properly you could do this. I stitched around the hem twice, leaving a 5mm gap between the two lines of stitching just to make it look more professional.


And then all of a sudden I had a denim skirt! I wasn't timing how long it took but it would have been less than an hour. So there is now one less idea sitting in the ideas bank, keep on the look out for some more little projects in the near future though as I continue to work my way through all my ideas.





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