Recycled skirts

It seems that the word for this these days is actually re-fashioning. Call it what you will - basically, I made two skirts out of two unwearable dresses.

This was the first one:

A lovely Zara dress in nice slinky fabric - but I finally had to admit that I'm never going to fit in it ever again. I bought it at my thinnest ever and that's just the way it is. So I chopped a rectangle out of the skirt, sewed it into a tube, turned over the top and put elastic in. Et voilà, skirt for a 3 year old! It didn't even need hemming as I just used the bottom of the original dress.

The second dress I had made myself, and it was a disaster. Wrong pattern/fabric combination, and a terrible fit too (I'm trying to learn my way out of that particular problem, but it's slow going for someone with no fashion school skills - I'm doing bas couture rather than haute at the moment). Two people suggested I just chop it in half and give it an elastic waistband, and once I'd got over my fit of pique about the original project's utter failure, that's what I did. It's a jersey fabric so I added some cheap polyester lining to make it hang nicely, and then I experimented with the invisible hemming on my new sewing machine. Result: rather nice skirt as long as you don't look too closely at the finishing.

Here we are wearing our recycled skirts:

As you can probably tell, we posed and took the photos ourselves.