The adventures of a 50 cent skirt

I really want to just start singing a song about this skirt to the tune of The Brady Bunch theme song. Here's a story, of a lovely skirt, who was bringing up...well, you get the idea. Anyway, I bought this skirt for 50cents at a garage sale. It's a fully lined Banana Republic wool skirt that I couldn't pass up for that price. It was a few sizes too big for me, and super long, and really, what was I going to wear it to? So, I started to think of some things to do with it. I thought that it might be the perfect length to change into a strapless dress for Easter, so I set to work.

I folded the top over about a half an inch, put in 1/4" elastic and sewed it inside.

That seemed to work for the top, but it was a straight skirt afterall and lacked some form, so I added a few darts in the front to pull the sides in a bit.

Again, all seemed well and I was quite pleased with myself. Then I put it on again, and realized that the edges could use some taking in, so I made some chalk lines and took the dress in to make it more form fitting. MISTAKE! I got the dress on, but literally had to seam rip myself out of it! It was TOO tight. And really, even though I took the sides in, it still seemed to lack shape, so I went to plan B.

Plan B was to cut the skirt in two pieces making an empire type waist at the top. I gathered the bottom of the skirt to take that in a bit and see if that would help.

Nope. It ended up being totally shapeless. I am sure I could have done something differently when I put the two pieces together again to give it more shape, but at that point, I was finished coming up with ideas. So I put the dress aside until I could think about what to do with it.

Then, at Easter, I was talking to my cousin and she mentioned making a paper bag waist skirt. It didn't cross my radar at the time, but I realized today that maybe I could try my hand at making one with the mess of a dress that I had on my hands. So I did some searching for some ideas and found this . I had everything on hand so I set to work.

I turned the dress inside out and cut the two pieces together leaving as much fabric as I could to work with. Then I turned the top down about 2 1/2-3 inches and pressed and pinned it in place. I then measured my elastic on my natural waist (not pulling too tightly), and pinned that at the bottom of the 2 1/2 inch mark. I sewed around holding the elastic tight and gathering the material underneath it. I sewed on the top edge and bottom edge of the elastic.

And this is what I came up with.

I realized I should have taken these pictures in black and white because my legs are so white you are probably blinded right now!

That's it! Next time, I think I will make the skirt about two inches longer. It's a little too short for this mom of three! What do you think? What are your worst sewing OOPs?

I am linking up to these parties