Basic fairy skirt tutorial
I made a basic fairy skirt to wear to a theme party about three years ago and enjoyed wearing it so much that I wished I had made one sooner instead of waiting for a occasion to wear one. Every day should be a fairy skirt day!
I would like to share the technique I used. It’s a fairly quick and simple way of making a dress up skirt for children – or yourself – if you don’t like shop bought ones.
You will need at least two layers of fabric cut into squares, roughly one metre squared will give you a length approximately to the knee on an adult. You can make the squares larger or smaller depending on how long you want the skirt to be and how wide your fabric is.
I used four layers, first – purple satin lining (goes on the bottom), second-mauve nylon organza, third-purple net/tulle, and fourth (top)-mauve organza with a sparkly star print.
You can use whatever type of fabric you want,but I would recommend using something non-see through on the bottom.
Layer the fabric on on your table or floor alternating between “square” position and “diamond”.
Now you will need to cut a hole in the centre big enough to go over the hips.
Hip measurement plus ease divided by 6.28 will give you the radius measurement to draw a circle with a compass, eg. hip measurement of 94cm plus 3 cm ease (97cm) divided by 6.28 equals 15.45cm, get a compass and set it to 15.45cm, draw a circle, and the circumference should be about 97cm.
Use the circle as at template to centre over the squares/diamonds and cut hole. Ok, back up a bit. Before you lay your squares out, fold each one in half, then in half again to find the centre. You can then use the dot from the compass in the middle of your template to line up with the corner that is the centre of the square and cut through four layers, using a quarter of the template. Or you can fold/cut your template into quarters and place on top edge to edge, then cut. Do this for each layer. If you are very brave, or have a fancy cutting tool you could do all the layers together. Pins are allowed – just don’t hit them with scissors, they don’t like it.
Make a casing for elastic by cutting a strip of fabric as long as the circumference of the circle plus 2cm seam allowance, approx 6cm wide, and stitch together. Cut elastic to fit waist measurement and join up, fold casing in half right sides out and attach to skirt with elastic inside.
This can be tricky, you can attach casing first if you want, leaving an opening for elastic and then thread the elastic through. Personally, I think that way is even more tricky, its up to you 
You could also just use some matching ribbing or knit fabric for a waistband, as long as it doesn’t stretch too much after sewing on to the skirt. We wouldn’t want our fairy to have her skirt falling down!
Now add a pretty top, some wings and a wand and off you go.
Jeans skirt refashion
Some of my friends will remember seeing this skirt before:
I made this about two years ago, from an old pair of jeans that I didn’t wear anymore. I was inspired by some original looking skirts I saw online made from jeans combined with other fabrics and decided to have a go at the jeans to skirt transformation myself.
There are many sites out there with tutorials that will show you how to turn jeans into a skirt with some slight variations, basically you cut the legs to the length required, cut or unpick the inner leg seams up to the crotch, then a little bit further up the front and back seams, overlap the top bits so they sit flat and then stitch in a triangle panel to fill in the gap. You can also cut up the side seams if you wish and insert panels for extra flare at the sides.
For more details check out Busy Parents online or this site with instructions from five other websites, or try this video if you like more visual instructions.
For my skirt, I decided lots of flowers up one side would be something different and add a bit of personality.
I made some patterns in varying sizes of my chosen motif – a five petal flower, and chose some red scrap fabrics with differing textures – plain cotton, printed, velvet and satin to make the flowers.
I appliqued some of the flower shapes onto the skirt and used others to make floating shapes to layer on top for a more textured look.
Some of the flowers were attached by sewing white flower and red seed beads in the centre and others were attached by sewing on some red tulle roses that I had made for another project many years ago.
I enjoy wearing my one of kind skirt to different occasions, and it certainly gets noticed!
