A tale of two t-skirts

i’m thrilled! i’ve been accepted to contribute to Refashion Co-op! i just love this blog with 100 contributors around the world who write about their projects upcycling and refashioning clothes to create reborn, unique, marvelous things to wear. i read it every day and it never ceases to inspire me, so i feel quite honored to participate. so, for my first project, i’m writing about two skirts that i made from t-shirts that i didn’t wear anymore for one reason or another.

for the first skirt i used two t-shirts that i bought 5 years ago and loved. but they were both a bit too short for me and i really can’t stand showing off my not-so-flat tummy. i didn’t take any pictures while i was sewing, but i turned the purple shirt upside down, cut open the shoulders, took off the sleeves and cut it at an angle. then i did a sort of patchwork behind, trying to get the stripes to go in different directions. i used the black shirt to make a waistband without elastic and then the part in front.

i based this on two projects from the book “reconstructing clothes for dummies” (“upside-down skirt in a topsy-turvy world” and “freeform and frill skirt”), but i did it my own way, not following the instructions perfectly. (another project i did from this book was my scarf-poncho.)

here’s the skirt seen from behind. i didn’t refinish the inside seams because you can just leave them with jersey. i preferred to overlock the hem. the waistband is very easy to do (like i did with my maternity pants), but in the end i don’t love plain fabric waistbands because they inevitably end up stretching and moving around.

what can i say? this skirt is so comfortable! it’s just what you’d expect from something made out of comfy t-shirts! then i love how fun it is to wear it. here it is in action, while i swirl my little guy. see how the frilly parts fly out?

for the second skirt i used a long-sleeved shirt which, i can still remember, i bought between my first and second year of university in a store on washington street in boston, and i always liked it a lot. but it had shrunk a little and now i can’t stand shirts with even a little bit of polyester in them. i just used a strip of the brown shirt for the elastic waistband.

i had planned on making a tube top with a built in bra inside, but when i started cutting the shirt i realized that you wouldn’t be able to see the red part anymore and it seemed a bit too blah without it. so i changed plans and decided to make another skirt. i cut again to make it assymetrical and did it more or less like the first skirt.

and here’s how it came out:

this time i put a wide elastic inside the waistband and i like it much more like that because it stays put. and then i decided to do the seams with the overlock machine and place them on the outside of the skirt so they’d be visible. (this last detail is typical of the style of the the aforementioned book.)

i’m not a fan of posed pictures, so here are some of the skirt in action, this time in the piazza of pontelandolfo (near benevento, italy). i love it not only for its comfort, but also how the fabric moves when i do or when there’s a breeze.