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| Inspiration |
I have been requested (well, sort of) to explain how I made this denim skirt. I really like denim skirts, and have lots and lots of jeans that I have worn through and can't make into shorts
if you know what I mean. However, the legs of the jeans are in excellent condition!! Also, most jean skirts have you do some weird fold over of the in seam, which is worn out (as afore mentioned) and not very nice to keep. I wanted something visually interesting, and stumbled across
that awesome skirt.
My skirt was made from 1 and a half pairs of jeans: full pair + legs. So really, you could save the shorts too.
Since I did not take pictures during the process I will do the best to recreate my madness for you!
First, find some jeans that have a very comfortable waist and rear.
Step 1. Cut off the legs. (Above the inseam and before the curvy part. Aka, really high)
Step 2. Very closely cut out the seams on the legs, so you have 4 good leg pieces. These can go as high as you want the skirt to be long. Make sense?
Step 3. Cut the legs into strips. I'd say no thinner than 3 inches wide, since you will lose some width in the seam allowance, but I just eyeballed it.
Step 4. Line up all your strips in an order you like. Since I was using 2 slightly different color pairs of jeans I chose to do light-light-dark, etc. I also moved around strips so that there weren't two really skinny or fat strips next to each other...and so on. The way I cut the 2 pairs of jeans ended up also making my pattern skinny strip-skinny strip-wide strip....
Then sew the strips together, right sides together. I just started with 2 strips, and then sewed on the next strip in the line up. Repeat!
**I chose to use the original hem of the jeans. This limited my use of the pant leg (no thigh pieces), but the hem looks nice. If you want to use strips from all over the jeans, just hem your skirt after Step 7.
Step 5. THINK.
So now you have a waist and pockets to legless jeans AND this bizarre length of blue jean strips.
Try on the naughty mini-skirt, and wrap the strip-skirt part around your hips to make sure there's actually enough skirt to go around. If not, you need to add more strips.
At this point I had to sit on the floor (because that's my big cut and design surface) for about 10 minutes just thinking. This is because I wanted my skirt to have a diagonal, which just about made my brain explode!
Step 6. Skirt. If your strip-skirt goes around your whole body AND lines up with the rough edge of the waist section. Sew it together in a loop. Ummm.... I mean. Sew it together to be a tube. Thus, we will attach the tube skirt to the (tubular) waist, and have a skirt that will fit on a 3D woman. ^^)
Step 7. Connect.
The end goal is to have "right sides together," right?
Lay out the "waist" section. Right side out like you would wear it. Then turn your tube skirt thing inside out. line up your rough edge (top of skirt) to the rough edge of the waist section (bottom, hips). This in effect should look like someone wearing a skirt and pulling up the skirt to flash their legs. Make sense? No? oh. Darn.
Well, sew the skirt section to the waist section. If you think there are going to be any funky wrinkles because they don't match up perfectly, you can always sew an extra seam to make the waist or the skirt a little skinnier to match.
Before you sew, make sure the BOTTOM hem and the TOP of the waist are parrallel. Or else your skirt will look like this:
Not what you want.
Sorry these last steps are super confusing. You can do it! I believe in you!
The end.
The 2-in-1 Messenger Bag concept was the result of one mother's frustration with hanging a diaper bag on a stroller. Because really, the under-carriage space is already full of purses and shopping bags if you're on a major outing. Thus she invented the 2-in-1 Stroller Bag so that she could have a long strap for wearing the diaper bag over her head/shoulder (not pictured), AND be able to snap it up on the stroller.
I would like to note here that the original design (which I followed) has the long part of the strap removable with velcro & snaps. If I ever make one of these again, I will just make the strap normally, and add snaps for easily hitching it up on a stroller. I mean, if I just had a baby, I would lose the long part and be stuck with a stroller-only bag. Thus, I'd rather it be one piece.
