Easy Refashion: Maxi Dress to Maxi Skirt

Some of you may have seen that my husband bought me A SEWING MACHINE FOR MY BIRTHDAY!! In case you can't tell, I'm really excited!

Man..now that I have sewing equipment...the possibilities are endless!

There are a few things in my closet that I am planning to repurpose/refashion.  My first garment to attack was this semi ugly maxi dress that I bought 4 years ago at Forever 21 for $10.

It served its purpose for awhile, but it hung really weird and was a tad short. Not too mention it was just way too much green. I decided to scrap it and turn it into a cute maxi skirt instead.

I started off  by chopping off the top.

Then I measured around my waist where I wanted the skirt to sit.  I subtracted 3 or 4 inches from that measurement, giving me the length of my waistband.  The reason I took 3 or 4 inches off is because this fabric is very stretchy and I wanted it to fit snugly around my waist.

I cut the waistband from the top of the material.  Since the material is folded in half, I just measured half the length of the waistband from one of the sides.  I wanted my waistband to be about 3 inches wide when finished, so doubled that to allow for folding it over (you'll see this later.)

I quickly sewed up the open side (short end) of the waistband and then folded it in half lengthwise.

Ta da..WAISTBAND! :)  This is essentially going to function as an elastic.  The actual skirt will be much wider.  I had to stretch the waist band as I sewed it to the skirt.  The result was a gathered skirt.  And here's how you do that:

Cut the remaining part of the dress to the appropriate length.  I simply evened off the top of it that way I could keep the original side seams and hem.  Next, pin the waistband to the top of the skirt, right sides together.  Start by pinning the side seams of the waistband to the side seams of the skirt.  Stretch the waistband and pin in several other spots to keep it roughly in place.  This part is tricky.  You want it to have an even amount of stretch all the way around, or else your skirt will be more gathered in certain places than in others.

Sew the waistband to the skirt.  Start at one of your pins.  Stretch the waistband between pins as you sew so that it fits the skirt.  I used a stretch zig zag stitch for this.  When you are finished sewing the waistband in place, flip it up and admire your work  :)  The entire project only took me like 15 minutes.

My waistband ended up stretching a little more than I had planned on.  In the future if I do this again, I will cut the waistband even smaller to allow for it to stretch out a little.  However, I am please with the results and know I will use this skirt much more often than I wore the ugly dress version.  Can't wait for spring!!!

Try to ignore my bright green socks peeking out :)