Tutorial: Mum Jeans turned tube skirt

Hellooooo! How are you? How was your weekend?

It's time for a tutorial! Yes yes yes!

You may remember a few weeks ago, I bought these rather attractive "mum" jeans from the opp shop. I had looked for a high-waisted demin skirt on-line but decided I would never find exactly what I liked, so I pinned my hopes on finding some high-waist roomy jeans instead 

The risk luckily paid off, and I have a nice skirt for spring to show for it, so lets have a little bit of snippy-sewy fun! 

So lets begin. Now this tutorial can work with jeans or trousers, both structured and loose. The same techniques apply and you can sew skirt styles like A line, tubes or mini's. I don't think you could get a whole circle skirt from it thought, so best not to try!

Start with cropping the pant legs just below the point you want it to end - the knee in my case

Take your quick-un-pick/ seam ripper do-dad and undo the stitches down the inside of the legs. There are a few layers of stitches to undo as most pants have a flat-felled seam

Once you're unpicked, clean up the seams and flatten them all out. Either with an iron or your hand

Cut away some of the excess fabric. You want to make a straight line so you're trying to cut out that triangular shape from the crotch.

Important to note - don't cut all the way to where you unpicked. Cut to about 1.5cm under that. You need a little bit of leeway to fold and stitch. I unfortunately cut away too much, but hey I'm the teacher and I'm making mistakes so you don't have to...

Once you've cut away the excess, admire your work and have a bickie. You deserved it! 

Now we're going to fold over the hem to sew down. This is why its important to leave yourself some excess fabric. I cut all the way to the stitching and couldn't undo any more. So it was really tricky to make myself a hem without then ending up with a weird wrinkly on the front 

Fold over the hem - about 1cm. In my image below, you can see how its puckered a bit because I didn't give myself enough allowance. 

You can shrink the pucker out with a steamy iron concentrated on the spot until is is smooth. 

Pin the folded hem over the it's neighbour. This isn't like your normal seam as we are sewing on the top over the it, not from the inside 

Here is the skirt pinned with the hem folded over - front and back

Pop your skirt in the machine and sew two rows of stitching about 8mm apart. Just like on a proper pair of jeans! I used an orange thread to match the rest of the stitching. You can buy the thick ginger coloured thread from the sewing supply store 

If you want a kick pleat at the back of the skirt, remember to leave some of the back un-stitched

For the kick - firstly try the skirt on and decide where you want the hem to be. Cut off the excess. 

Sew across the pleat at the base of your double row of stitching to secure closed. 

Sew two rows of stitching down both sides of the kick. This will continue on with matching the original stitches on the jeans and will look neat! 

Voila!

Fold over your hem - once or twice - whatever you like, and sew it closed 

Give it an iron and shrink out any kicky bits with the steamy iron. 

And hopefully you'll be left with something like this! 

From this...

To this! 

Hiding my face cause no make up! 

Faceted brass necklace from Etsy

Mine still has some kinks, but the iron sorted most of that out.

I hope the tutorial made some kind of sense, it's almost my bed time and I'm getting a little sleepy!

Please feel free to ask me any questions in the comments as well 

Enjoy your week lovelies and I hope you get behind your sewing machine at some point!

Cat xo