Turning Ratty Pants into a Skirt

Or, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure! Today I’ll be sharing where I am in the process of turning a few pairs of ratty pants into a skirt. Let’s get started!

These are the “ratty pants” in question. My idea was that by cutting pieces out of the more usable sections of fabric, I could make a (hopefully) cute patchwork skirt!

I started by making a pattern. I outlined one of my other skirts onto some paper.

Then I drew some lines for the patchwork part of the pattern. I didn’t want to make the lines too even or anything. I liked the look of the uneven lines.

It might be a little hard to see in the above picture, but I tried to label the different patches so they would be easily kept track of. The “t” in T1, T2, and T3 stand for tier. I knew that after cutting out the patches, they would be difficult to tell apart. I’ll show how I solved that problem a little later in the post.

The next step was to cut apart the pants. Then I cut out the pattern pieces. It was a little interesting trying to find enough usable fabric, but I had just enough.

I cut out the pieces with roughly the same seam allowance. No measuring, though. I just eyeballed it. 😉

After I took the papers off the pieces, I used pins to keep track of the different pieces. Blue ones for the top tier, yellow for the middle, and pink for the third. Then one for the first one, two for the second, and so on. It was an easy way of knowing which pieces went where.

Then I sewed everything together. It actually turned out pretty much as I’d imagined. Then I repeated the same steps for the other side of the skirt. I still have to iron down the seams, topstitch, sew the back and front together, and insert a zipper… So, I’m pretty much done! 😉

And that’s how I’m turning ratty pants into a skirt. Oh, and by the way, I’ve started an Instagram account for my blog now! Check in there for little details and things that might not otherwise make it onto the blog! ~ Emily