First skirt

This week in 4-H we made skirts out of t-shirts.  I'm sure someone else has done this before, but we thought it was a clever way to take advantage of a factory sewn hem.  Each girl brought an old adult sized shirt, most of the shirts were scavenged from their mom's to-be-donated-to-charity bag, so $0 !!!!  If you are looking for a shirt to remake, look for one that the bottom hem makes a continuous hollow tube, not one with side slits.  Also note the length from the armpit to the hem; that will be the length of your skirt. . . I'm probably too tall to ever make one of these for myself, but they are cute on the girls.

Here's the basic plan

I forgot to say that we pinned a safety pin on the end of the drawstring to help give us something to hang on to as we threaded it through the waistband.

We put a lettuce edge hem on them since you can only do that with knits.  There are hundreds of tutorials out there for lettuce edge hems.  We don't have a serger, and found the tightest, widest zigzag stitch on my sewing machine worked just fine for us.  My advice is that you use some of the scraps from the t-shirt to test out your stitch with your weight of fabric.  Thinner fabrics seemed to get more ruffly than the heavier ones.  Another tip, I know I told you in the last post to slow your machine down for beginners, but with the lettuce edge you are stretching the fabric as you sew and all the girls got better, smoother results when they went faster.

Here's a close up of that lettuce edge.

I am possibly a tad biased, but S just has a knack for this sewing business.  I can show her a technique once and she gets pretty decent results pretty quickly.  It might be because she's seen me sewing all the time, but she is fearless.  M needed a pair of shorts mended and who do you think did that for him?  Yep, S did.  She was already messing around at the machine when M came looking for me to mend the shorts and she said, “Here, just give them to me Dad.”, sewed them right up, and taught M a thing or two in the process!