Frugal sewing: dance skirts
I’ll admit, I lost my blogging mojo for a little while. I was still sewing! But I didn’t feel like sharing. Instead of apologizing and explaining, I’ll just jump back in here as if nothing happened and show you something I recently sewed, sound good?
I have two daughters who dance and since my other hobby is photography, we really love taking dance photos together. It’s sort of carried us through these ridiculously long winter months. They were wanting some flowy skirts to take photos in, but I didn’t really want to spend the money on yardage, so I dug through my drawer instead and found the costume I wore in a recital in Hawaii when I took an adult ballet class. I don’t have a before photo of it, but the skirt portion had both a lace overlay and a lining. I cut both layers off the bodice and made them into skirts!
Here are a couple shots we took:
These are very easy to make and a very frugal way to turn dresses into skirts! I bought a package of wide black elastic and zig-zagged the raw edge onto it. If you’re unsure how to do this, here’s how:
Cut the elastic to fit the waist
Lap the ends of the elastic and zig-zig it together so it’s a circle.
Mark the elastic in fourths and do the same with the skirt waist opening
The skirt opening will be larger than your elastic. Pin the skirt to your elastic, matching your marks.
Using a zig zag stitch, sew the skirt onto the elastic, about a half an inch from the bottom of the elastic (see photo below), stretching the elastic to fit. This edge will be on the inside. The outside will look nice and clean.
This technique is also useful if you have girls whose dresses get too small or too short. Simply cut off the skirt and attach elastic and give it new life as a skirt!
I also went to the thrift store that same day to look for some frugal dance skirts and found this amazing Free People (ahem, expensive) skirt! I paid $5. I also thrifted this purple King size sheet to use as a backdrop. This is probably my favorite shot of the day.
I’ve sewn some pretty great pieces lately for myself. Hopefully I can take some photos of those soon and show you!
Cheers :)