Last week, I posted about customising clothes, focusing on tees and shirts. Here’s part two, which looks at skirts and trousers!
In some ways bottoms can be a little harder to customise,
particularly trousers. There may be lots of seams, pockets, zips and goodness
knows what else to work around, and if you’ve got a sewing machine like mine,
sewing several layers of heavy fabric can be difficult if not impossible!
Plain work skirt gains playful feature
This skirt had already been customised by its previous
owner, in that it had been made shorter, which saved me a job!
I injected some fun and colour into the style by sewing on
some contrasting trim in a wavy pattern and adding buttons to the peaks and
troughs of the wavy line.
Tired old jeans become super skirts!
These four skirts all started off as jeans (or trousers, in
case of the pink one!)
I cut off the legs just above the crotch and sewed on
various fabrics to create the skirts.
With the top two skirts, the fabric used was from the bottom
of two old skirts (you’ll recognise the fabric from the top left one later in
this post!) I also embellished one pocket on each with buttons.
The bottom left skirt is actually customised with a
pillowcase! The pillowcase had a stain on one side but I was able to cut it up
and sew it into panels.
As for the bottom right skirt, I cut off a men’s shirt a
little way under the armpits and sewed that on, gathering as I went along.
Khaki glum to jungle glam
Similarly to the skirts above, I cut these trousers off
about half-way down the leg. I then unpicked the seams, trimmed a little
(especially around the crotch area) and sewed in contrasting fabric inserts to
the front, back and sides to complete the skirt.
Marked for the chop, rescued into crops!
These gorgeous Gap trousers were another garment with stains
that wouldn’t come out! The style was very flattering and fabric beautifully
soft, so the answer was simple: cut off above the stains and re-hem into a cute
pair of crops!
Feeling blue? Feeling good!
Yet another stained item! I couldn’t cut this off above all
of the marks as it would have been too short. So instead I cut it to a more flattering length and used some leftover trim to embellish, which hid the stains. :)
The skirt was missing a button and the three that remained
didn’t all match, so I sewed on four matching replacements.
Frumpy becomes fabulous!
The fabric on this skirt was awesome--fantastic for the warm
summer weather. But the style left a lot
to be desired. I hacked off a few inches from the bottom of this skirt to combine
with some jeans to make another skirt (as seen previously in this post). This
skirt had a lining too, and thanks to the design, I was able to turn the fabric
inside out, sew the lining and outer fabric together (gathering the fabric
slightly), and turn the right way to create a slight puffball effect.
Boring brown gets the rosette!
This skirt wasn’t too bad to start off with. The style was
nice and the fabric was pretty good quality...but it was so plain!
I added detail by making some ribbon rosettes (using the
same method as in my scout badge ribbon rosette brooches) which
I sewed on and embellished with buttons.
Don’t waste your offcuts!
I’m cheating a little here.
This skirt didn’t start off as any single garment. The whole
thing is made off-cuts from other makeovers, all of which you’ll notice on this
page! I sewed them together and gave it a simple drawstring waist.
You certainly won’t find this
in any charity shop!
As I stated in part one, these garments were all customised
by me as part of a local charity’s ‘recycle and remake’ promotion. All items of
clothing were donations that either weren’t sellable due to damage, or had been
in the shop for week without selling.
I hope these two posts have been inspiring! Next time you
pass by that almost-perfect shirt or skirt, stop, go back, and reconsider! For
a little work, you could have something awesome and entirely unique.
Ha ha, how long did it take you to come up with all of those slogans under the photos?
ReplyDeleteThese are really good, I've started unpacking my wardrobe (i.e. actually hanging things up) and I've found more than enough things to refashion when I get around to it!!