How to Sew an Upcycled Denim Skirt from Your Old Blue Jeans

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 If you sew, and especially if you love to upcycle, the upcycled denim skirt is a rite of passage. Here's how to make one! 

 You will need: 

  well-fitting pair of blue jeans. Maybe they have holes in the knees that you don't want to patch. Maybe they're too short, and you don't want to sew on a cuff or a ruffle. Whatever the reason for converting them into a skirt, they should fit well in the waist. 

  thread and sewing needle for denim. I like using the extra-strong thread made especially for denim, and you'll need an extra-sharp needle for your sewing machine. 

  decorative fabric scrap (optional). You can piece together the front and back panels of your skirt using the legs from your jeans, but it's also possible, as I did in the photo above, to use a contrasting fabric. Flannel is a good choice to better match the weight of the denim, but anything will work.

  double-fold bias tape (optional). In the image above, you'll also see that I bound the bottom hem with scrap bias tape. It's optional, as you can also simply hem the bottom. 

 1. Measure and cut off the legs of your jeans. Measure from your waist to your desired hemline, then add a couple of inches for hem allowance and shaping. Place your jeans flat onto a cutting mat (iron them first if you need to), with the front and back waistband aligned and the crotch seam centered. See the image above for what that should look like. Cut the legs of the jeans straight across at your measurement, and set them aside for later. 

 2. Pick apart the inseam. You can use a seam ripper for this step, but I actually prefer a sharp pair of thread scissors. Either way, don't be surprised if it makes your hands sore--this step can be a lot of work! 

 3. Sew up the crotch overlap. Iron the jeans again, flattening them and adjusting them so that the outside leg seams are straight. This should shape the jeans into a natural A-line, but there should also be a triangle-shaped flap of fabric at the crotch that you'll have to overlap. You can pick apart the seam there to overlap it more smoothly, but with these thin, child-sized jeans, I just folded the flap over, pinned, then sewed it down. Here's what it looks like from the inside, with contrasting thread so you can see it: 

 Repeat for the back side of the jeans. 

  4. Add a panel of fabric to the front and back. Again shape and flatten the jeans as you did in step 3, then place a panel of fabric behind the legs, to cover the large, triangular-shaped hole in the front of the jeans. Pin it in place-- 

 --then sew around the raw edges of the jeans legs. Turn the jeans inside out and cut away the excess fabric on the outside of that stitching line. The visible raw edges of the jeans legs will fray slightly with washing, but won't fray past your stitching line. It'll look pretty! 

 Repeat for the other side of the jeans.

  5. Shape the skirt. Once again flatten, shape, and align your denim skirt on top of a cutting mat. Use a piece of chalk to shape the bottom edge of the skirt into a more pleasing curve, then trim it to that shape. 

  6. Hem or bind the bottom edge of the skirt. There are a few ways to do this. If your skirt is all denim, you can again stitch around the bottom hem, leaving it to fray up to but not past that stitching line. If you prefer a neat edge, you can fold the entire bottom edge up to the back twice, then sew it to make a traditional hem. 

 I got my daughter's approval to use up a couple of leftover pieces of bias tape to bind around the bottom of the skirt. She likes the extra pop of color, and I think that a bias tape hem is easier to do than folding denim over twice and trying to sew it. 

 Once you've got this method down, you'll find that there are a lot of fun ways to alter, embellish, and otherwise play with this simple design.

How to Add a Hood to a T-shirt Pattern

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 When you're sewing a T-shirt, adding a hood is one of the easier modifications to the pattern that you can make. It's a modification that also looks a lot harder to do than it is, so get ready to impress all of your friends with your mad sewing skills! 

 To make a hooded T-shirt, you will need: 

  a good T-shirt pattern. I'm using the Oliver + S School Bus T-shirt pattern, which you can read my review of here. 

  a well-fitting hoodie. It should be made from a fabric similar to what you'll be using for your T-shirt, so a sweatshirt with a hood won't work here. I don't always love tutorials that ask you to copy something that you already own--if you own one, do you really need to make another?--but this is the quickest and easiest way to draft a hood pattern. Other options include reading up on how to draft a hood pattern from scratch, or simply asking your buddies if they have a hoodie that you can borrow for five minutes. 

  jersey knit fabric. The blue fabric for this shirt is upcycled from other T-shirts, but the black fabric is store-bought jersey knit. You can see that they both work well here. 

  sewing supplies. Don't forget the ballpoint needle for your sewing machine! 

 1. Trace the hood. I have some extra tips for copying an existing piece of clothing here. Seriously, masking tape is your friend! 

 Note the general shape of the hood in the photo above. No matter what hood you copy, that general shape should be the same. Pay special attention to the curve at the neckline--that's key to a hood that will fit the shirt's neckline well. 

  2. Make modifications. You want your hood to slightly overlap at the front--you can get a view of what this will look like both in the top photo here and in the top photo of my review of the Oliver + S School Bus T-shirt pattern. The degree of overlap is up to you, and there's a lot of wiggle room. 

In this shirt, for instance, the overlap is maybe an inch, but I sewed a second hooded T-shirt this weekend with a hood overlap of at least three inches, and although it felt like a lot as I was sewing it, it looked totally fine and normal on the kid, and she declared that she liked it even better than the first hood. So there you go. 

 3. Add seam allowance. You'll need seam allowance for the bottom and the top/back, and a hemming allowance for the front. I've gone into detail in a previous post about how to enlarge a curve on a pattern, so you should be all set! 

 4. Cut out the pattern pieces and sew. You'll need two hood pieces, and you'll immediately sew them together to create the complete hood. You won't need the neckband from your T-shirt pattern. Instead, you'll sew the hood on in place of the neckband, centering the back seam of the hood onto the center of the back piece of the T-shirt, then sewing all the way around, overlapping the front pieces of the hood at the center of the front piece of the T-shirt. 

 You can further modify this hood by adding trim to the front edge or the middle seam (think pony mane or dinosaur spikes), or making it deeper and taller (think wizard's hood).

How to Sew a Button Back on Your Pants

This tutorial was originally posted on Crafting a Green World.

Alas, for the button has just popped off your pants! 

If you're lucky, it has simply fallen to the floor at your feet, ideally while you're getting dressed alone in your room surrounded by plenty of other suitable pants options. Of course, the way this year has been going, it's much more likely that your button has pinged off explosively in the middle of a crowded room, probably while you, yourself, are at the center of attention, and it has first smacked someone important in the eye and then fallen... somewhere, probably deep in a crack between the floorboards. And that was your only pair of nice pants. Fortunately, sewing a button back on your pants is a super easy and low-fuss skill that requires only a basic amount of hand-eye coordination. Anyone can do it!

Tools Needed

You will need:

Replacement Button

Look all over the inside of your pants and it's very likely that you'll find a couple of spare buttons sewn into a seam somewhere. Even this pair of fast-fashion H&M cargo shorts comes with two replacement buttons! If your pants didn't come with any spare buttons, however, you can use any same-sized button. Take a spare one from another pair of pants, perhaps, or ask around your local buy-nothing group.

Needle, Thread, Scissors, Seam ripper

Dig through your junk drawer until you find that travel sewing kit you got somewhere, or ask the hostess or concierge if you're somewhere public. If you do need to buy your supplies new, however, a small travel sewing kit is an inexpensive and practical purchase; look for one that has a seam ripper, a choice of pins and sewing needles, and a small selection of threads in basic colors.

Directions

As a quick note, in most cases, people want to mend their possessions to look as similar to new as possible, and that's okay! Don't be afraid, though, to have a little fun with your repair. With these shorts, I did use the spare button that came with them, primarily because it's a boring brown button. If I used a cute button from my stash then I'd just have one more boring brown button in my stash, instead, and I already have plenty of boring brown buttons, thank you very much. BUT, instead of boring brown thread, I used awesome fuchsia embroidery floss, because when I mend something I like to make it fun. Bonus: embroidery floss is very sturdy!

1. Pick Away Loose Threads

 

Your button likely left a mess of thread behind when it fell off. Use the seam ripper to pick all of that out, being careful not to pierce the fabric of your pants with its pointy end.

2. Stitch An X To Start

 When the loose threads are gone, you'll likely see evidence on the fabric of where the button stitching was. If you're lucky, you'll even see holes in the fabric from the stitching. 

 That's great because you want to sew your button back on exactly where it was before. Thread your needle, and using those holes if you have them, stitch a small x exactly where you want the center of your button to be. Buttons have to undergo a lot of pressure, and this x reinforces the button and your sewing.

 

3. Sew The Button To Your Pants

This part is a little tricky, so stay with me here: you can't simply sew the button directly to your pants. It feels obvious that you should be able to, but if you did, you wouldn't actually be able to button them, because there wouldn't be any room behind the button for the buttonhole fabric. Instead, when you sew the button to your pants, you have to leave a gap between the button and the pants. You're going to do that by holding something narrow--a pin from your sewing kit, perhaps, or the stabby bit of the seam ripper--against the top of the button as you sew it. Here's what it looks like: 

 In the above photo, I'm stitching up from the back of the fabric, using the same hole that I made stitching my starting x, pushing my needle up through one of the holes in the button, and pushing it down through another hole in the button and into the fabric, using another one of the holes that I made stitching my starting x. Before I pull the thread tight, I'm placing my seam ripper on top of the button, essentially sewing the seam ripper to the top of the button. This is the fiddliest part of the process, because you'll feel like you need one hand to hold the fabric, one hand to hold the needle, one hand to hold the button, and one hand to hold the seam ripper in place. Just try not to throw the whole thing across the room and after you've done a couple of passes, the seam ripper will stay put on its own. How many times you sew through the holes in your button is going to depend entirely on the width and quality of your thread. If you're using the thread that came with your travel sewing kit, it's probably on the flimsier side, and so you may need to sew through those holes eight or so times. With my embroidery floss, I only had to sew through each hole twice. With standard store-bought thread, a good number is around six.

4. Make The Button's Shank

 This is my favorite part! When you're satisfied that the button is secure, make sure your needle is at the back of the fabric, then remove the seam ripper and pull the button away from the fabric. Now you've got plenty of room for your pants to button! 

 Push your needle back through the fabric, then wrap it around the thread between the button and the fabric 6-8 times, forming the button's shank. When the shank looks nice and tidy and is completely covered by wrapped thread, stop wrapping so your shank doesn't get too bulky and push your needle back through the fabric.

 

5. Knot The Thread

Sew a stitch through your cross-stitch x, pull it snug, and knot it against the fabric. Cut away the excess thread. Although I used pants for my demo, this method works exactly the same, of course, for any button, whether it's on a shirt or a bag or a skirt. Shank buttons work differently, but you're not going to find those on a pair of pants.

How to Refashion Pants into a Skirt

This tutorial was originally published on Crafting a Green World in 2017.

 There are several ways to refashion pants into a skirt, including this cute method for making a denim skirt out of a pair of old blue jeans. Even that method, though, can feel overwhelming to a newbie sewer, so here's an even easier method! 

 As you can see in the image above, all you need for this refashion are: 

  a pair of pants that fit well at the waist. They can be as ripped, stained, or ugly as they need to be in the legs, as long as they're well-fitting in the waist. This is a great way to refashion pants that are too short after your kid hits her latest growth spurt, or winter pants that you know will be too short next fall. It's also great for those carpenter/bootleg/skinny/whatever style of jeans you've got that used to be trendy but are now just laughable, the poor things. 

  an A-line skirt whose diameter at some point matches the hip measurement of your pants. The waist on this skirt doesn't matter at all, as long as at some point its flare has the same measurement as the hip measurement of your pants. That's because you're going to do this: 

1. Line up the pants and the skirt at their matching measurements. As you can see in the above image, I've drawn a chalk line exactly where I want to cut the pants--see how this allows me to keep the entire waist and pockets of the pants? You can sew a well-fitting skirt without knowing how to set pockets or sew a waistband or use a zipper foot or make a button hole! 

 Line up the skirt (or dress--in this tute, I'm using a very sketchy-looking thrifted dress whose fabric my kid loves), so that the point at which its flare matches the length of that chalk line are exactly lined up. Here is where you also make sure that the bottom hem of the skirt is exactly parallel to that chalk line--you don't want your skirt to hang weird! 

  2. Cut the two pieces of clothing along the marked line. Hold them down firmly to keep them from shifting, then cut them both at the same time. 

  3. Sew the skirt piece and pants piece together. Turn the skirt piece inside-out, then pin it, right sides together, to the pants piece so that the raw edges are lined up. Sew the two pieces together and then finish the seam. 

 My daughter and I used this skirt as part of her design for this year's Trashion/Refashion Show in our town, which is why it has Christmas lights safety pinned to it:  She paired it with a hooded shirt that I sewed from another pair of pants and a dressy blouse, and a cape that she cut out of an old fleece blanket, but I'll tell you about those another time!

It Only Took Me Two Years to Make This Diagonal Denim Strip Quilt

 Because I get distracted...

I get so habitually distracted that one of my New Year tasks is to look through last year's planner and transfer all of my WIPs from the previous year to a new list in the front of my new planner. This year's WIP list holds 21 items, which... that's a lot of projects to have started and not finished...

But but BUT that list actually used to have TWENTY-THREE items, but I did finally update the kids' Girl Scout vests with their new badges and patches AND I finally made the broken dish pendant I'd been wanting.

Of course, Will's Girl Scout vest already needs another new badge sewn onto it, but whatever. Instead, let's focus on THIS awesome project that I knocked off my list this month!

Not gonna lie: I started this quilt for Syd, and this quilt for Will, AND a still-unfinished quilt for my bed two years ago, thinking that I'd give myself just loads and loads and loads of time to piddle my way through them by Christmas. I like to give everyone a cozy present on Christmas Eve, and homemade denim quilts would fit the bill just fine!

Yeah... no. I gave everyone giant fuzzy slippers instead. And THIS Christmas Eve I gave them all STORE-BOUGHT fuzzy blankets, gasp! I even had Will's quilt already completed by that time, but Syd's was still a pile of denim and flannel. 

Finally I decided that the quilts would make a cozy Valentine's Day present for the kids, so I buckled down and spent most of a day basically making Syd's quilt from start to finish:

For Will's quilt, I'd done horizontal rows, and I'd tried for an ombre effect, but I don't really love it. For Syd's quilt, I tried diagonal rows, and I love it so much that I feel a little guilty that Will's quilt isn't so good, yikes:

In case you ever come over to my house and wonder why I have literal masking tape on my literal family room floor, it's so that I can lay out a quilt whenever I want. I am literally just that classy!

And as always, back-to-front binding is THE way to go:

I am so pleased with how this quilt came out!

It's super cozy and warm, it's comfortingly heavy, it was dead easy to make because it doesn't even require batting, and because the entire top is upcycled jeans, the only costs were for the flannel backing, the thread, and the approximately one zillion jeans needles I broke sewing over those one zillion seams:

I'd say that diagonal rows are now my go-to denim quilt design, but the quilt that I'm planning for my bed is going to be a square, and I'm currently obsessed with the idea of sewing it in a log cabin design.

Maybe I'll even have it finished in time to show it to you within the next couple of years!

Trashion/Refashion Show 2019: Gibbon Girl

It's fun to see how Syd has grown in the nine years that she's participated in our town's Trashion/Refashion Show:

2011: Fairy Princess

2012: Rainbow Fairy

2013: Rose Dress

2014: Upside-Down Orange

2015: The Awesomes (with WILL!!!)

2016: The Phoenix (which I sewed while sick with the flu)

2017: Supergirl of the Night (the last design that I helped Syd sew)

2018: Medieval Maiden (the first garment that Syd constructed completely independently)

And that brings us to 2019: The Year of the Gibbon!

These are Syd's application pictures, and every year they suck, because February is rarely well-lit. Oh, well. You can still see that Syd's vision is a caped black tunic and leggings (upcycled from a few black tops and sweaters that we thrifted). The highlight of the garment is a pair of sleeves that Syd can make look ruched, but can also make look like this:

She used a pair of pants for those sleeves, and later altered it so that she could have a secret pass-through for her hands when they're in their super-long formation.

Syd really, really liked the idea of sleeves that drape like a bridal train, but she also intended from the beginning that they could be fully weaponized, like so:

I love seeing her have so much fun with her design. From the very beginning, Syd's garments have always been playful, and most of them embrace big, powerful movement.

Her garments are never something that you simply wear; they're something that you DO:

 Our town's Trashion/Refashion Show is happily well-situated within our busy spring every year--it's generally about a month after cookie season, and about a month before Syd's birthday party. It's nice, because as soon as we finish planning for one thing, we can move right into the next!

The day of the fashion show is the hair/makeup call, then the stage rehearsal, then cooling our heels in the house while the other acts rehearse--

--then the pizza party--

--then the fun time of squeezing into a few square inches in the overcrowded dressing rooms backstage--

--and then I go sit in the audience with the rest of the extended family, and Syd?

She shines.

Here are some cheater pics that I took during the dress rehearsal:

And here's the real show:



This year's official show photographer has been taking photos for four years now, and he also created the slideshow that played between the acts. Check out this awesome tribute that he made for all of the Trashion Kids--he made a whole slide for each kid that he'd seen come back every year, and here's Syd's!

Look at how she's grown. Syd actually HATES it when people tell her how much she's grown (it's Nutcracker-related trauma on account of they cast by height and they're always looking for the shortest kids and it sucks), but look at the kid in those photos. She has grown! Syd has always been an artist, but she's become such an able DIYer, too, confidently constructing her vision garment from top to bottom, shoes to hairstyle. Those leggings? She sewed them from a stretchy black sweater, sure, but she also did it WITHOUT A PATTERN. No template. She didn't even trace another pair of leggings! She just... started cutting, sewed them up, and boom. Perfect leggings.

Perfect leggings. Smoky eye shadow that she applied herself. A garment with sleeves fit for royalty and suitable as long-range weapons.

I absolutely can't wait to see what this kids does next.