How to Sew a Poodle Skirt

I  originally published this tutorial on Crafting a Green World.

You guys, if you have never read about the history of the poodle skirt, I need to start you off with the information that it is just about the most fascinating thing EVER.

Basically, back in 1947, a woman wanted something awesome to wear to a holiday party. Being of a DIY mindset, she made herself a circle skirt out of felt (no seams!), then decorated it with cute appliques.

As you can imagine, knowing how ubiquitous the term "poodle skirt" is today, her creation went over very, very, very well.

What you might not have imagined before, however, is that it's not just poodles that were on the poodle skirt. In fact, that first Christmas skirt didn't even have poodles on it at all! Throughout the poodle skirt's massive popularity in the 1950s, people felt free to personalize it in whatever ways that appealed to them.

Think cacti. Or horses. Or Elvis Presley silhouettes. Cartoon mice. The Eiffel Tower.

So when you think of a poodle skirt, you really should be thinking of a simple felt circle skirt with novelty felt appliques.

Easy to make. Endlessly customizable. NOW you want to make one, don't you?!? So let's do it!

Tools & Supplies

To make a poodle skirt of your own, you will need the following:

• Felt. In Step #1, you'll do the calculations to learn how much felt you'll need for the skirt. You'll also want felt in the appropriate colors for all of your appliques.
• Matching thread. I don't use interfacing when I sew, because it's costlier and less eco-friendly than doing without, so you'll want a matching thread to sew your appliques to the skirt.
• Measuring supplies. Get yourself one of those yardsticks with a hole at one end (or just drill the hole yourself). You also need chalk and scissors.
• Stencils and templates. I freehanded some of the appliques on the particular skirt that I'm showing you in this tute, but other appliques came from Google Image searches. I'm not selling the skirt, so it's cool.
• Sewing notions. See Step #1 for these, too.

Directions

1. Calculate the measurements for your skirt. A circle skirt is exactly what it sounds like--a skirt in the shape of a perfect circle, with another circle, cut out for the waist.

So first, stop and think about how you want to get the skirt onto your body and keep it there. The skirt in this tute has an elastic waist, which means that I cut the center hole large enough for my kid to pull it up over her hips, and then I sewed 2" elastic to it for the waistband. This is a great solution for a kid or a teenager because as the kid grows, it's possible to remove the waistband, enlarge that center hole (provided that you've left the room and the skirt is long enough), and add new elastic. I  fully expect my kid's poodle skirt to last her through adulthood.

If you're already an adult, however, you can instead cut that center hole to size and install a zipper. It's more work, but the skirt would be less bulky at the waist and you could make it with a smaller piece of felt.

Either option is totally up to you!

So decide that first, so that you know the measurement for the center hole. The measurement will be the circumference of the circle that you want. In this case, I want a measurement of 24" so that my little noodle can get the skirt up over her little noodle hips.

Now, either do the math or plug that number into this circle calculator. The number that you want to get from this calculator is the radius. A circle that is 24" in circumference has a radius of 3.8". If you're going with the elastic waistband method, go ahead and round up to the nearest inch, which makes my new radius 4".

Next, decide how long you want the skirt to be, measuring from the waist to where you want the bottom hem to hit. I wanted another 20" of length. To find the total radius of the circle that you need to cut, you need to add that radius to the radius of the center hole. In this case, the total radius of my circle is 24". Double that number, and you'll have the total dimension of felt that you need in both length and width. Fortunately, felt comes in up to 72" widths, so you can make a pretty good-sized skirt from a single piece of felt.

Once you have your yardage, fold it into quarters. The very center of the piece of fabric will now be one of your corners. Place the hole in the yardstick right at this corner, and use it as the pivot to mark your total radius measurement in chalk. You'll see a perfect quarter of a circle marked out. Do the same thing, this time measuring the radius of the center hole. Cut them both through all four layers of fabric, then unfold the fabric and marvel at your perfectly-measured and cut circle skirt!

2. Add felt appliques. With the skirt unfolded, create and lay out the appliques until you're happy with their placement. You can also add other embellishments, such as the necklaces that I put on both of the unicorns, and a rope ladder from one of the caves.

When you're happy with the placement, pin all of the appliques to the skirt.

3. Sew the appliques to the skirt. Felt doesn't unravel, so you don't have to satin-stitch these appliques in place. With matching thread installed, I set my sewing machine to a stitch length of 3 and a width of 3, then zig-zagged around each applique. I highly recommend a walking foot for this.

4. Add a bias tape hem, if you'd like one. Again, felt won't unravel, so any kind of hem is completely optional. However, I thought that this skirt did look much more finished with the addition of a double-fold bias tape hem in a complementary color. I'd have had to stitch the appliques all around the hem, anyway, so it wasn't that much more work to add it.

5. Add the waistband of your choosing. For the elastic waistband on this skirt, I cut a piece of 2" elastic in a complementary color to the exact waist measurement (22.75"). I lapped the ends, marked both the elastic and the skirt waist at the quarters, pinned them together at the marks,  then zig-zag stitched them together, stretching the elastic to match the skirt as I sewed. It took less than ten minutes!

While felt is a very sturdy fabric, if I were you I'd remind whoever plans to wear the skirt that felt is also quite delicate. I know people were wearing these all throughout the 1950s, but people took better care of their clothes then, and also Velcro wasn't commercially available until the late 1950s. Velcro will pull at felt something terrible, so be careful when it's around.

Felt also doesn't wash well in a washing machine and doesn't dry well in a dryer. It'll be okay if you wash it on cold and hang it to dry, but it's better yet if you pretend like you're wearing your poodle skirt to a sock hop every time you put it on and treat it accordingly.

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Hooded Towels and Painted Rocks

a tutorial for kid-painted rocks

and a tutorial for Syd's new monogrammed hooded towel

It's just the thing for swim class and goofing around in the YMCA pool; it's easy for her to get around herself, it's easy to keep from falling off her as she walks, and it covers more of her body than a beach towel would, so that drying off is at least a possibility (what is with kids refusing to actually DRY themselves with a towel, instead huddling, soaking wet, underneath it while griping a lot?).

Unfortunately, the hooded towel is not quite a match for the morning diving lessons that Syd's been taking this week--what is also up with this late July being so COLD?!? The other, good parents have taken to bringing multiple towels and robes, etc., for their kids, but my kids, who know full well what they *ought* to pack for themselves for the pool... well, this morning Sydney brought a bath towel, still damp from yesterday because she left it crumpled in a heap in the car, and Willow didn't bring anything, because her crumpled towel had actually been underneath Syd's crumpled towel in the car, and thus was still dripping wet.

Air-drying at 70 degrees on an overcast morning is probably good for one's immune system, yes?

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Handmade Looms and a Rock Star Dress (and Four New Babies, Too)

a round-up of handmade looms crafted from upcycled materials

and a review of the Cool Water dress from Sew Pretty: T-Shirt Dresses

I messed up the distance between the upper black and white ruffle and the pink skulls ruffle--I'm not going to  try to fix it, but it did cause me to see that the dress with only two ruffles would be a pretty cool top. Mod to come:

In other news, I took a deep breath, gathered some supplies, put Matt to work with a box knife and plenty of duct tape, and accepted the generosity of a good friend in her gift of four of her recently-hatched chicks:

We can keep up to five hens in our yard, but really I only want two or three, so hopefully one or two, but not all four, of these babies will be boys, because I don't know how we'll stand to choose which ones to give back to my friend, otherwise.

Because we LOVE these chicks. LOVE. THEM. Especially Fluffball:

Fluffball is some kind of chicken genius, I swear. Willow is all the time catching potato bugs (I pay her a penny for each bug she picks out of my garden, payable upon the dollar) and dropping them into the chicks' brooder, and so far only Fluffball has figured out the utter awesomeness of these bugs. She'll run up right away and start grabbing them up, and then the other chicks will get excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth and try to get it from her, but in the rare instances that they actually do, they just stare at the bug and they're all, "What's the hell is THIS thing?!?", but in that time Fluffball has managed to grab another bug, which gets the chicks all excited because she's excited, so they'll chase her around with a bug in her mouth.

Fluffball can also roost on the rock that we've got in there for some chick enrichment, and she can jump off of your hand if you put it super low to the ground, and once Sydney had her outside of her brooder on the floor with her, and she saw an ant crawling by, and she ate it!

Of course, we love Arrow, Crow, and Cluck, too. But it's nice to know that they've got a chicken genius like Fluffball to show them what's what.

The Most Ridiculously Cute Superhero at the Playground

The purple and pink superhero cape that I sewed as a birthday present for a little buddy of Sydney's was already tooth-achingly cute, but I had the feeling that it could be made even more nauseatingly cuter:

Buttons! I certainly wouldn't recommed this for the under-three set, but Syd's pal is turning a grand three years old, and so I glued each button down with clear epoxy glue, then stitched each one to the cape with achingly cute pink thread:

Syd, of course, couldn't permit her friend to receive an untested cape--what if it malfunctioned, somehow, and did NOT render superpowers? So we spent some time at the playground on the eve before the big ballerina party, so that Syd could make sure that the cape rendered its powers effectively:

 
 Yep, seems to work just fine.

Tutorial: A Volcano in, I Mean on, Your Pants

I'm really clumsy, and I think I also may be getting old. Before I had kiddos, when Matt and I played adult co-rec softball together (Go, Ballantine Tool and Die!!!), we used to joke that adult recreational sports are so interesting to watch primarily because of the very real possibility of seeing an adult seriously injure themselves. I saw people blow out knees and backs and break feet and ankles, and those were just the non-contact injuries.

I had my own non-softball, non-contact injury last week when, while racing the girls to their school building, I tripped and fell and skinned my knee something fierce. Oh, what did I trip on? Um...nothing.

I'll save you the descriptions of the blood and gore and scabs and general grossness--let's just say it was AWESOME--and turn, now, to the damage done to my third-favorite pair of pants, a comfy pair of cargos bought for two dollars at Goodwill. They were, of course, ripped to all get-out. It was tragic. Heartbreaking. It called, clearly, for a jaunty applique patch. Here's how to make one:

First, you have to seam together the rip in your pants:
See, isn't it huge? Hearbreaking, I tell ya.

Next, you have to cut yourself out a jaunty applique. Use a pre-washed fabric that's the same weight as, or heavier than, your pants fabric. I'm using pre-washed upholstery sample fabric, and I used my Cricut to cut a pattern template from
out of cardstock: my patch is going to be a volcano.

Pin your applique exactly where you want it on your pants. I don't use fusible webbing or any of that heat-set crap for clothing anymore, so use as many pins as you need to feel confident that your patch won't shift. Feel free to add on whatever you want to make your repair job not just functional but super-awesome:
The plume of fire coming out of the volcano? Just there for show.

Now that wide-legged pants are in style, you can satin stitch your applique without having to open up a side seam, although it does require a little fiddling:See, here I've got the fabric fiddled in such a way that I can sew all those roughly parallel spots pretty easily, and when I've done those I'll shift and futz the fabric around to get a new angle and sew the perpendicular spots. If you're getting skipped stiches, it probably means that you need to move to a heavier needle--you're already using a jeans needle, right?

When you're done, you'll have an awesome, sturdy applique that makes your pants look even better than they did originally:
And you'll discover how hard it is to get a good photograph of your own knee.

Butterfly Butts

Those who have heard me rant about the inappropriateness of words and slogans on the butts of girls' pants might find the following evening shot incongruous:
The butterfly, however, turns out to be the perfect shape for reinforcing the backs of pants--look how the wings add extra strength to the often-abraded seat and upper thigh area, and the butterfly's body covers a seam that can commonly split through stress.

And also? The girls came in the study while I was ironing upholstery fabric to vinyl records (don't ask) and wanted stuff ironed to their stuff, too.

That being said, I'm still not in love with fusible webbing. If these pants weren't already on their death beds (I stuck a few more appliques and reverse appliques over the worst of the stains and holes on the fronts of the pants as well, just leaving the, you know, less worse alone), I probably wouldn't try the experiment, because I'm not positive that, over time, the appliques will be able to handle the stress of living on the butts of two very active little girls.

I do, however, recommend fusible webbing for projects that won't get a lot of wear, such as home dec stuff or the fronts of T-shirts, or projects with fiddly little designs, such as my butterfly, or even projects where you can't make your machine sewing accessible, such as a child's shirt sleeve. And here's how to do it (it's really easy):

1. Read the directions on your package of no-sew heat bond adhesive. I use , and Chasing Cheerios, who does a lot of fusible applique, uses Steam a Seam. If you're using a very thick fabric you may have to extend your ironing time by a few seconds, so the directions are something to think about ahead of time.

2. Lay your fabric face-down on your ironing surface, iron it so that it's wrinkle-free, and let it cool.

3. Lay your adhesive paper-side up, so that the adhesive side is facing the wrong side of your fabric.

4. Following the directions on the adhesive package, bond the adhesive to the fabric, bonding an area just bigger than your stencil or pattern (if I'm using a paper pattern, I'll sometimes lay it on top of the paper while I'm ironing so that I bond only the correct area.

5. Cut the bonded fabric away from the rest of the roll of adhesive.

6. Lay your stencil or pattern on top of the paper backing to the adhesive and trace your applique directly onto the paper.

7. Cut out your applique, using nail or thread scissors for those fiddly little corners.

8. Lay your item of clothing or whatever out on your ironing surface, iron the area to be appliqued, and let it cool.

9. Peel the paper off of your applique and place it on your material exactly where you want it to be.

10. Following the directions on the package, bond the applique to the material. If you go under the correct amount of ironing time your applique won't bond, but you can try again after it's cool. If you go over the correct amount of ironing time, however, the adhesive can melt into your applique fabric and then it won't bond at all.

To applique onto non-fabric, which is trickier, check out my post at Crafting a Green World.

Tree People

We were tree people today. Tree people can spend half a day frolicking in the half-tree's worth of leaves that fall from the next-door-neighbor's maple in one day, enjoying their soft yellow awesomeness before they get all damp and gross and have to be raked over onto the lasagna garden:
Tree people can spend the other half of the day going up and down, up and down the "climbing tree" over at Bryan Park. Our Sydney made one more leap into big-girl territory by climbing all by herself higher than my head:
This rationally leads, of course, to the next milestone, which is her first tree climbing-related injury:
She is so hardcore.

Perhaps motivated by the strange message left for me on my study table while I was out of the room--
--I finished our family's Halloween bunting:
It's another one with recycled blue jean pennant flags and bias tape made from a remnant of brown cotton. I printed the letters out onto freezer paper, which I then ironed onto felt. I hand-cut out all the letters, peeled off the freezer paper, temporarily attached the letters to the flags with a glue stick, and carefully appliqued them on using the freehand stitch attachment on my sewing machine:

I'm actually really fond of the felt, which is a brand called Eco-Spun that is made from recycled plastic bottles--I'm not in love with wool felt, on account of the sheepies it comes from, so it's nice to have an eco-friendly acrylic option.

Tomorrow, the girls and I are going to explore the joy that is Contact paper when creating Halloween tree ornaments. The day after that, I think I'll break out the power drill for the exact same purpose--mwa-ha-ha!

Yes, I Am...

...a fangeek. I made this applique to cover some holes in my T-shirt left by another applique I put there just for fun only it looked really, really stupid and also? Made my breasts look very odd. So then, after ripping it off, I actually did need an applique on my T-shirt. The material is a much nicer linen than I can afford, because I cut it out of the extra material from a pillowcase that I sewed a pillowcase dress from.

If you need further proof of my fangeekiness, check out Willow covering the Peter, Paul, and Mary hit "Puff the Magic Dragon:"

She totally sings, right, that Puff lives in the Autoverse? You know, home of Optimus Prime and the Decepticons?

Fine. It's just me, then.

P.S. The list continues:

21. Bathtowels and handtowels to replace the ones that get used for wiping fingerpainty hands and scrubbing yogurt off of the floor just as often as they get used for legitimate body drying. I'd love to sew them out of a thick hemp terry--does that exist, I wonder?

22. Socks, socks, socks, socks!!!

Let There Be Shorts

Um, still working on that living room table. I had an edge cleaned off this morning, but then the girls and I immediately used that clear workspace to start seeds in the peat pots we'd filled with dirt a few days ago. Gourd, tomato, brussels sprouts, and peppers before they got bored, and I'm totally cleaning off that table tonight!


More pressing matters are afoot, anyhow--the big garage sale fundraiser for Willow's school is next week, and in lieu of giving the school any meaningful monetary donation this year (except for the meaningful size of tuition) on account of we're very poor, I'm poring through our house, which really isn't crammed with stuff we don't need despite photos to the contrary, to find all the stuff we can donate. This coincides neatly, of course, with the seasonal transition of winter wardrobes to spring ensembles, and so what have I been doing? Cutting pants into shorts and long-sleeved shirts into short-sleeved shirts, of course.


This is a very useful thing to do, but with more than one kid, the calculations of what gets altered can be quite complex. Sydney is simple, since I don't plan to birth more babies: long pants that aren't fancy enough to attempt selling to Once Upon a Child and that likely will be too small in the fall are cut into shorts. Same for long-sleeved shirts. Long pants that Sydney grew too tall for during the winter are dragged back out and any her waist still fits into are cut into shorts. Weird stains I haven't been able to soak out are covered with jaunty fleece or uphostery fabric appliques. She tries them on, and cuteness prevails:

Notice that some fabrics do better with hemming, and with some, you don't have to bother: kids are the only group who can still pull off the frayed look.

Now with Willow's clothes, I have to set aside not only what she'll likely still be able to wear next fall, but also what is in good-enough condition to pass down to Syd. This winter was the first one in which Will was hard enough on her clothes to actually blow out the knees of numerous pants. Any pants with thin knees get cut into shorts. Pants that I hated the look of often look cuter as shorts. Don't forget to cut the shorts long--not only might you want to hem them after all, but with all the sunshine they're going to get, the kids are going to grow like weeds. I always cut the kids' stuff pretty long, anyway--I do NOT like the look of short shorts, even just girl-style short, on little girls. My girls are proud of their bodies, and I'm fine with them showing them, but this look just seems, maybe because teenage girls also like to get their hoochie on in short shorts, too sexualized for kids. So cut them long, hem them if you want, add appliques over weird stains.

Winter clothes--sweaters can be worn longer if you add a front zipper so you don't have to squeeze protesting heads through outgrown neckholes. Or, you can cut the sleeves off and hem them with a zigzag stitch for a cute vest. Or, you can cut them in half in the front and hem the raw edges and just let the kids rock it like that on a cool night.

The joy of bare knees and elbows after a long, wet winter--do you remember how awesome that is? If you don't, ask my kids. They'll tell you it's pretty sweet.

Starry Pants and Who and Grrr Panties

If you don't want to buy new stuff all the time, it's really important to be able to turn clothes you don't want to wear anymore, for whatever reason, into clothes that you do want to wear. One of the problems that our family has is that we never dress appropriately for messy activities--as a result of our on-again, off-again home improvement activities (which will result, I think, primarily in lowering the future selling value of our house), we have purple paint (yes, an actual room of our house is actually painted purple) on not one, but two pairs of gym pants and one work shirt, and blue paint on one ringer tee. Now, the work shirt will need to be turned into a floaty summer dress for one of the girls, but the other clothing items are going to benefit from handmade fleece appliques. And by handmade, I mean stars that I unevenly sketch onto fleece and then cut out and sew over permanent stains with a zigzag stitch. Fleece is a nice choice, I think, because it won't ravel even if you don't stitch it well, and I like the way it stretches a little as you sew it--you know how I hate for things to look precise. So here are my favorite pair of comfy red pants, confined to the to-be-mended shelf for too many months because of its stupid purple paint stains, finally mended and made happy again:

I think it turned out pretty great. The grey sweat pants, appliqued with an X, still need some work since, as Matt pointed out, the X is placed so as to seemingly mark a spot located directly between my butt cheeks...

Thin cotton T-shirts make good panties, and here's an example from Goodwill that is now Willow's favorite pair of panties, although she wears them backwards because she likes to look at the owl, not have it on her butt:

Here's a shirt from Matt's closet, a Christmas present from his mother, which was a little too fancy for a guy who wears only soccer or comic book shirts outside of work, and is now a pair of panties for me:

Grrr!