A skirt for my niece

I read a lot of crafty blogs. Sometimes they have wonderful directions for things that make me want to drop everything and try. This is one. I would put a link but I don't remember the first place I read about this and if you google it there are probably 100's of places.

This is a recycled small girls skirt. It is made out of an old Gap sweater of mine...very old, as in it went to storage for the past 5 years or so. These things are so easy and quite addictive to make. My daughter has several made out of old cotton turtlenecks from the Ancient Maritime store.

Here are my simple sewing by the seat of your pants directions. Wash sweater and dry it in the dryer, even it is wool. You want it to felt a little.

Then cut along skirt out - to do this you just cut right where the body and the sleeves join. The cut part is actually going to be the unhemmed bottom. The sides just stay sewn up as they were sewn by some poor woman in a sweatshop somewhere. To 'hem' the bottom, you use the zig zag stitch on the machine and pull on the sweater as you do it. The pulling will help make a little ruffle at the bottom if it is a wool sweater - cotton not so much.

Then to make the waist band - the proper bottom of the sweater is your waist band, you just flip it over, either inside or outside and zig zag around, not pulling this time if it's a wool sweater. Leave a little opening and then thread your elastic through on a safety pin. Then stitch elastic together - this can be a little fiddly and stitch the little opening closed on the waist band. This will fit probably a 2-3-4 year old.

If your into this, you can also save the top half and sleeves and make other things - baby pants for example. Maybe I will show some of those tomorrow...it's supposed to snow 5 cm or 20 cm.