Hello!
Welcome to Make Thrift Buy, the show where YOU send in cool clothes & accessories that
you’ve found on the internet and then I do my best to recreate them!
Today’s challenge was sent in by Syeda who wanted me to try and recreate this skirt from
Abercrombie & Fitch.
Now this item’s existence makes me SO so angry - BECAUSE it’s meant to look like
a DIY, like something that you’ve made for yourself… except that it’s not.
Instead you pay $68 + shipping for the privilege of owning a skirt that looks like it's been
upcycled from a pair of jeans.
My BRAIN.
Plus it’s probably made in sweatshop-like conditions . God I hate the fashion world
sometimes.
So, bringing this full-circle, today we're actually going to try and make this for ourselves,
actually using an old pair of jeans and upcycling them.
So let's get started.
So here is the pair of jeans that I will be upcycling – and they were $4 from the thrift
store.
You can generally find old jeans in-abundance at charity stores and thrift stores – especially
baggy bootcut jeans like these ones here.
So I measured approximately how long I wanted the skirt to be, added a couple of inches
to this measurement to be on the safe side, and then I chopped off the legs at this point.
The next thing that I did was to remove the stitches, which is also called “seam ripping”,
all around the crotch and the inner legs.
The easiest way to rip seams is to get a pair of small, sharp embroidery scissors, and,
turning the jeans inside out, find those serged seams that look like this – so the serged
seams where there’s loops along the top with two horizontal threads running across
these loops.
The threads that you want to cut through are these horizontal ones, cutting approximately
every 4th or 5th thread or so.
Once I’d cut through those threads all the way around the inner leg, I could quickly
and simply pull the seams apart, like this!
Next I also seam-ripped up the crotch seam to just below the zipper.
I did the same thing on the back of the jeans, ripping the seam approximately the same length
that I did on the front.
Then, I took this front crotch flap – okay, I am aware that this description is sounding
more like an anatomy lesson than anything else but bear with me – I took the front
crotch… “section”… and I overlapped it onto the other side of the jeans, making
sure that the two were laying flat.
Then I stuck some pins through these overlapping pieces, to hold them together, and with some
yellow thread that matched the thread already in use on the jeans, I sewed the two pieces
together like this.
To sew the pieces together I used a denim needle, which is slightly sturdier, thicker
and stronger than a regular sewing needle, and I also used a “triple stitch”.
A triple stitch is basically a straight stitch that is thicker and provides more reinforcement
than a regular straight stitch.
Then I repeated the exact same thing on the back of the jeans.
When this was done, I tried the skirt on to see how it fit.
Now because the original jeans were quite baggy, I actually wanted to take in the sides
of the skirt a little bit so that it didn’t flare out so much.
So, to do this, I drew two marks on either side of the point that’s just underneath
where my hips end.
Then on both sides of the skirt I pinched the fabric to make the skirt tighter and reduce
that flare – without stretching the triangle in the middle, because that needs to remain
flat - otherwise everything will go wrong here.
Then, at the places where I had pinched the fabric, I drew two small marks with chalk,
and then I joined these two marks with that below-hip mark in a triangle like this.
Using a pair of scissors, I then cut up that side seam and I pulled it open up to the top
of the triangle.
Then, with the skirt inside out, and the fabric right-sides together, I matched up the old
side seams.
And then, I duplicated the chalk line from the front of the fabric onto the inside.
I put pins through both layers and then I sewed down here, using a straight stitch,
to make my new side seam.
And I repeated this on the other side of the skirt.
Once the new side seams were sewn together, and I’d tried on the skirt again to make
sure that I was happy with it, I cut the excess fabric away from the new seam like this.
Now, demin will fray the first time that you wash it but then it will STOP fraying, it’s
like magic, so don’t worry about the raw edges of the denim inside the skirt here.
So this is my new side seam, and to finish it off I pressed the seam to one side and
I top-stitched along one side of the seam, like this.
The last step was to fill in the gaps between the legs, which I did by grabbing a piece
of the leg that I had cut off in the first step, laying it flat underneath the triangle,
pinning it in place, like this, and then sewing it to the front pieces of the new skirt.
This time I used a blue thread which blended into the colour of the jeans, and I also used
a normal straight stitch.
Then I cut off the excess fabric inside the skirt, and I repeated the same thing to the
back of the skirt!
When that was done, I tried the skirt on, and I shortened it to the length that I wanted
by drawing a slightly curved line across the bottom of the skirt, like this.
Then, I cut straight across this line using a normal pair of fabric scissors.
Annnnd, well the original skirt wasn’t hemmed either, so I’m going to be leaving the bottom
edge raw as well!
So, now I’m sure you all want to know… how did I go?
[Music plays]
Woo hoo!
Those old, unflattering pair of jeans is now this super cute denim skirt.
And, it only cost me $4.
Get out of here, Abercrombie and Fitch.
This is the real deal.
My conclusion is: [Scissor snipping and zipper sound effect]
Thrift a pair of old denim jeans and make this for yourself.
Before you all go, I want to tell you something very exciting – I launched my new website
yesterday!
It’s basically a place where you can go and find out about what me and my community
are doing, but the part of it that I’m most proud of is this page here: The Beginner’s
Sewing Resource!
It’s full of all the important stuff you need to know if you’re just starting out
sewing and trying to make your own clothes, and even if you’ve been sewing for a while
I recommend checking it out because you'll probably still find some useful information
on there!
It’s got both tutorials from me and from all my favourite sewists - sewers - sewists?
from around the internet.
It’s at annikavictoria.com, so go check it out and let me know what you think!
Anyway, that’s it from me!
Thank you for watching and I’ll see you all next time.
Bye!
Thank you to all of my supporters on Patreon for making these videos possible.
To become my patreon supporter, go to patreon.com/annikavictoria!