Customising Clothes: Bottoms

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.