Exploding Thighs

Exploding thighs - that's what happened to my trusty black skinny jeans. A few weeks ago I was pottering around the house, probably occupied in a sewing-based task, and I heard a rip as I sat down. There goes another pair of jeans......

I'm not really rock 'n roll enough to walk around with my inner thigh hanging out, but there was still a lot of life in these jeans. I hate throwing away clothes! And I didn't have the heart to give them to charity with a big hole in them. So I folded them up, put them in the wardrobe, and forgot about them.

Until I was getting dressed one day, and realised I needed a black skirt for slobbing about in. Didn't I have some old jeans somewhere??

Turning old jeans into a skirt

First, I unpicked the inside leg seams. This was the longest step in the whole process - unpicking overlocking is so tedious! And messy! I tried tearing through the layers with my stitch ripper, but couldn't get very far because the stitching was so tight. I slowly unpicked, and snipped, and so on until it looked like this:

Then I unpicked the center front seam to the base of the zip, and the centre back seam until somewhere past the curve, where the seam straightens out. I also left long ends to pull through to the wrong side. I laid the jeans flat, and then overlapped the front and back sections so that the skirt was flat. It looked like this:

Front, with centre front overlapped

Back, with seat area overlapping.

Luckily, it worked out so the big hole was covered up!

Next, I estimated how long I wanted the skirt to be (roughly knee length), and chopped off the legs, leaving a bit more for a hem:

I used these leg pieces to fill in the gaps front and back, pinned them in place, and stitched it all:

Turned up a hem of about 1"/2.5 cm, and voila:

Front view

back view

And there you go - an easy way to add to your wardrobe without spending any money!