Quick Fixes: One-hour Skirt!

     Let me lay out the timeline for you on this skirt: I bought some plain black stretchy fabric yesterday, intending to make a skirt just like one I already own with it for this blog post. Faffed about town for a bit, went home, did some work on the manuscript I'm editing for a few hours, then realized at 9:00 that I hadn't started the skirt. Panicked. Started sewing...then finished the skirt at 10:00 pm. It was like magic! I love when projects go quickly without any huge life-altering "why did I think I could sew in the first place" mishaps. 

     So let me walk you through how I copied the skirt on the left to make the black one on the right! 

If you're noticing that the black skirt looks longer, that's because it is. It was on purpose, I promise.

     First I flattened the existing skirt out on top of my fabric and simply cut around it, leaving space for seam allowance. I know it's hard to tell, but the existing skirt does actually have a waistband, so I folded that over at the seam, added seam allowance, and cut it out as if it wasn't there so that I could add the waistband as a separate piece later. 

Go ahead and just cut around the cat. Also, I'm wearing shorts here, I promise. They just got hidden behind my giant "Depressed Mr. Rogers" sweater.

     Then I folded the fabric over so that when I cut out the waistband I'd be left with four pieces. To do this, again I just cut out around the free edges, leaving seam allowance, then folded the skirt up at the seam to see where I should cut the remaining edge. Which left me with a skirt front, skirt back, and two waistband pieces, each of which is two layers of fabric. It's helpful to fold the pieces exactly in half and cut a notch in each to mark the center for alignment purposes later.

More cat-butt. I guess that's what you get when you work in the floor.

     
     Then I pinned the edges together and sewed along the sides of the main skirt piece and sewed the waistband pieces together into one circular piece. Next I sewed along the top of the circular piece so that when I turned it right-side-out it would have a finished edge on top and an open edge on the bottom.I know that was confusing, so here's a picture to (hopefully) help:

In case that description was super confusing: two seams here, connecting a front waistband and a back waistband, each of which is two layers of fabric that I treated as one. Helpful? Making it worse? I dunno, I try.

     Then I just had to carefully align the seams and notches and sew the waistband to the skirt with the raw edges aligned. I suppose if you're an over-achiever or a perfectionist you could serge the inside edges, but this fabric isn't going to unravel or fray at all and I'm lazy, so I didn't. Don't be like me. Or do, it's fun sometimes. 

     All that was left at that point was a quick hem, which I won't bother including pictures of because duh, it's a hem. You fold it and iron it and sew it and then go "yay." And it was done! 

The weird line on my face is because there's a mirror on the wall reflecting funny, I didn't just get overaggressive with the contouring this morning. Also I can tell my brain is straight up DONE for the day because I just stared at this for three full minutes trying to figure out how that shadow works.

     So there you have it, the world's fastest skirt. If you don't have a skirt to copy but you still want to make one, you could easily just pin the fabric onto your body wrong-side out, pin it where you want it to fit, and sew it up that way. Or you could do the whole bit with measuring and thinking things through, but I don't enjoy that, so I wouldn't recommend it, personally. The end!