Karlene's Workshop

Jeans skirt refashion

Posted on 30 June 2009

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!