Yellow dress to skirt refashion tutorial

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Here's another clothes upcycle - for anyone who's new here, I love upcycling and in May I challenged myself to a whole month with a clothes upcycle project a day! (Yes I succeeded!!)

Some of those projects - and many many more from lots of very talented people can be found on this page - where you'll find a constantly growing resources of ideas for upcycling your old clothes! (well over 600!)
 Do take a look!!




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My youngest daughter requested this refashion from a hand-me-down dress she didn't like.

She wanted it as a skirt- with a headband to match!

Here's the dress we started with:

I cut the top bodice, and the bubble base part off the dress:

So I was left with just a wide band to which I needed to add new elastic to make the skirt:

I finished the bottom of the skirt off with a rolled hem using my overlocker (serger)

And neatened the top edge of the skirt to prevent fraying - also using my overlocker (serger)

Then I ran a row of stitching around the top of the skirt - on the longest stitch length and highest tension on my machine - to ruffle the fabric up and help me pin it to the elastic:

The waist elastic length I measured from another of my daughters skirts and stitched securely into a band:

To help pin the skirt evenly to the elastic, folded the band in half both ways to find 4 even points - where I put in pins.

Then did the same with the skirt - and matched up those 4 parts pinning the two together:

Then I stitched the top of the skirt to the elastic, using wide zig-zag stitch and stretching the elastic as I stitched:

Then I turned the elastic in on the skirt..

And top stitched it down again with a wide zig-zag stitch,stretching the elastic as I stitched:

And there we have a new skirt:

With a headband to match using the remaining fabric:

And of course the obligatory cool pose to show it all off!!

For the downloadable PDF version of this tutorial, click here.

And for plenty more sewing tutorials for all levels of sewing abilities, do take a look at 
My Free Sewing Tutorials Page.