Spring tiered skort

Fun spring tiered skort!

So I have to confess that I have a problem...I love a good deal! Maybe 2 years ago now I bought a cute spring fabric remnant at Joanns, even though I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I do this all the time!

Well, I finally found something to do with it! And I must say that I love how it turned out. 

I've been wanting to make another skirt for a while now, but couldn't come up with just the right idea. Something fun, but not difficult. Something with some flair, but with shorts underneath. (My oldest daughter won't wear a skirt without shorts.) And their are lots of skirt options, just do a basic Pinterest search and you'll be blown away.

My idea for this also came out of a desire to do a skort and not wanting to make shorts. Not to mention that I have a giant pile of long knit pants that have never been worn by my children. You just don't need long pants in south Florida!

Basic idea: create a tiered skort, using a fabric remnant and an unused pair of knit pants.

Materials:
approx. 1/2 yard fabric
knit pants with an elastic waist
sewing machine, coordinating thread, scissors/pinking shears, serger (optional)

Wash and dry your fabric. Then start out by laying out your fabric, ironing it if needed and marking it off in strips. I think my strips are about 3.5 4 inches each. Obviously I just made this off the top of my head, so go with whatever looks good to you! You could also do different lengths for each layer and different colors and fabric for the layers too. And while some tired skirt tutorials will tell you to make your skirt from the bottom up, this skirt I made from the top down.

Isn't this fabric cute?

You then need to ruffle your strips. Do this on the sewing machine by adjusting to the longest stitch length and a higher tension number.  It took a couple tries to find the right setting on my machine, so don't worry if you have to play around with this.  Don't backstitch as you're basting these stitches,

Once you're done ruffling, you can start to assemble the skirt.  Think of the elastic waistband of the knit pants as the waistband to your skirt.  Putting right sides together, stretch the elastic waistband as you stitch the fabric to the skirt, using a zig zag stitch. I used one strip all the way around the waistband. The pants were a 5T.

Then you'll want to take your next strip and sew it to the bottom of the top strip. Again put right sides together as you sew. Because you're now sewing onto the bottom of a ruffle, you'll need more than one strip on each layer from now on.  I like to sew a couple strips together before I start on the next layer so that I don't have to stop and add a new strip, I can just sew it on all the way around. I sewed the strips together with a straight stitch and then finished it with a zig zag stitch. You could also use a serger to finish off your seams. 

As you can see, I did 3 tiers. The skirt has a nice spin to it! 

When you have made it as long as you'd like, finish the skirt with a hem. You're going to want to  use your iron to fold the bottom up a small amount, then up again the same amount. Top stitch. I thought about adding some decorative ric rac to the bottom edge, but my daughter liked it as it was. 

I was also planning to cut off the pants, but she liked playing with it today with the pants long, so we'll save that for another day, maybe in the summer when it's 90 degrees. :) The nice thing about knit is that it doesn't fray, and since it will be shorts under the skirt, no one will see it. You can just cut it and not have to worry about a hem. 

So there you go!
Easy and cute! Now go find some extra fabric and spruce up those boring pants!

And I apologize for the poor quality of the pictures, she was just so excited to be wearing it and twirling around! :)

Short Skirt re-do

My little Miss G. isn't so little anymore. In fact, my kindergartner is getting tall! Which of course means that the skirts that she loves to wear everyday are getting short!

I thought I'd try and fix this by lengthening her skirt, and what do you know, it worked!! As you can see in the photo of the all black skirt, I had to cut a few of the top layers off, then I added a strip of pinkish knit to it.

I made some basting stiches to help create the ruffle, and finished it off with using some glittery thread in my serger. It made a fun lettuce edge and best of all, it twirls beautifully!! At first Miss G. wasn't sure if she liked it, but the twirling is what made her love it (she wanted to wear it to bed!).

Success!!

~ patricia

Update to the Polka dot circle skirt

Awhile back I showed you all the black and white polka dot circle skirt that I was working on...and I love, love, love how it turned out! I just wanted to update that I figured out the best way to finish it off, and I wanted to share it with you today!

Drum roll please........Serging! More specifically, purple serging. That's right, a little shiny purple thread in the serger brings this skirt up a notch (as if the awesome, twirly, polka-dottiness doesn't brighten your day already?).

Want to make one (or two) of your own? They are so easy! Follow Dana's instructions from Dana-made-it, here. She did an awesome job of laying everything out, step by step.  I used 3 in black elastic for the top. The fabric is a satiny polyester (or something) that I found at Joann's.  I also got the fabric in a pink polka dots for my girls.

Make a few and get spinning!

I used 3 in. black elastic for the waistband. 

A shiny purple thread in the serger finished it off nicely!

Tape skirt

I saw this great idea on Pinterest from UCreate: use fabric markers to create stripes, etc. on a solid color t-shirt. LOVE!!! Here's a link to their post and tutorial.

Here's a photo of my work in-progress. I didn't realize that you could use blue painter's tape on fabric. Good thing I had some left over from when I painted our playroom! I bought this skirt for a few bucks at Target, so I wasn't too concerned with the outcome, especially since I had two little helpers!! The fabric markers I bought were sort of pastel in color, so I didn't turn out quite as bold as I imagined. Big sister got a skirt with stripes and little sister got a skirt with stars! I'll find the finished skirts tomorrow and post!

Maternity Extravaganza!

Lately I've been getting tired of wearing the same old maternity clothes that I've been wearing for my last 2 pregnancies (they've survived some of my friend's pregnancies as well!). Last pregnancy, I purchased a dress from Old Navy that turned out to be just hideous. I've come to this conclusion after much thought about it, and probably only wearing it once, because I realized it had such potential, but something just wasn't right about it. So I turned it into this dress:

And I like it so much better now! I followed this tutorial, using an old tank, some elastic and the skirt off the hideous dress. My advice is to put the skirt on first, and then try it on over the tank top, pinning it where you want and then sewing it together. I tried sorta just eye-balling where to put the tank part first, and had to take it apart because it got a little bulgy in places and didn't lay quite right. I chose this particular tank for this project because 1) it was one size too big already (perfect for a growing baby body) and 2) because it had bleach spots on it. I honestly don't know where those spots came from, because I never use bleach, but that's another story! I realized that some of the little spots where near the top, so after reading about this tutorial on how to change up your dark t-shirts using a bleach pen, I decided to give it a try! Here's how it turned out up close, before I washed it:

And after (which really doesn't do it justice, the lighting is so bad it looks like two different shirts! I promise it's the same one, and that the background color remained the same):

Using the bleach pen was fairly easy (I just put a towel underneath and then washed it separately after about 10 minutes. I'd like to try it again, using a shirt that isn't ribbed, which I think would work better. And I'm going to have to work on my art skills too, maybe find a drawing somewhere that I like and copy it. Overall the dress took an hour or two to make, which made this a really easy, cheap project and finally, something fun for me! ~Patricia

Aloha!

Our family was recently invited to a Luau, so of course I had to get crafty! Last year, we went and didn't wear anything Hawaiian (except the leis they provided), so I thought that this year I would make the girls some cute outfits out of some Hawaiian print material I found at Jo-Ann's.

I finished the bubble skirt for my 1.5 year old yesterday:

I was so happy with the results! I used this awesome tutorial as a guide, but I made-up my own measurements for the skirt, as well as fudged my way along to make a casing for the waistband.

Now I've been researching on Pinterest for a dress for my 5 year old, as she said that she wanted a dress and not a skirt. Stay tuned!!