Sewing

Have you already heard about “upcycling”? It’s a quite recent term, which was first used in 1994 in an article by Thornton Kay. It is the process of converting waste materials or useless products into news materials/products of better quality or for better environmental value. Guess what? I looked this up on Wikipedia!

I have to admit that I do upcycle regularly, especially when I am sewing some of the soft toys. For example, I use old white shirts for the mouths of the monster pillows or old colored bed sheets for some of my little monsters… And the old jeans trousers were transformed into modern denim Christmas garlands!

Upcycling is not new to me! But today I tried something else. I upgraded an old pair of jeans of our youngest into a modern, girly jeans skirt for the little cousin.

For this I used a pair of old jeans, which I cut the legs of. The pants were too short and had holes on the knees (which had already been closed several times!).

I selected 2 different kinds of fabric, one in bright colors and the second one with a softer pattern. I cut stripes out of 10 and 15 cm, in the whole width of both tissues, which I then passed under the sewing machine to make them curl.

To fix the strips, it is easier to open one of the side seams of the old trouser by 2-3 cm. Now place the 2 strips one over the other and into the side seam. Sew the strips together to the old trouser. After having sewed a whole tour, you can cut away the overhanging tissue. Then I fixed some ribbon around the jeans to hide the seam. Turn the skirt inside out and fix the seam on the side. Almost finished! Now you only need to sew the rolled hem of the lower parts of the strips! And you can even finish it up with your own label…

Check out the result!