Week 7 - Pillow Case Skirt

Hi! I hope you all are having a nice week! I sure am. It's my first full week on the summer schedule and I love it! I have so much time to get things done around the house!

This week's project was a fun one! 

Yesterday I made a skirt out of a pillow case! I first saw this on pintrest a few months ago. I looked at all the different tutorials and decided to take this project into my own hands. I made my first pillow case skirt a while back for me to wear on Easter. It turned out okay and I got a lot of compliments, but I wasn't fully satisfied. I had an idea for how I could make it better. Hence today's post!

I didn't have any cute pillow cases that I wanted to cut up so I kept my eye open at yard sales. Last week I found 4 super cute/perfect-for-skirts pillow cases! 

What I learned from this project - I would say I learned how to sew with elastic, but I didn't really SEW with elastic, so I'll just say I learned how to work with elastic.

Note: Making this skirt the way I do in this post unfortunately only applies if you have a very small stature, (like me). Otherwise you can make it for your favorite 10 - 12 year old. Ha!

Cute huh?

First, gather your supplies. (Pillow case, matching thread, elastic measured to fit your natural waist)

 Measure from your natural waist to where you want the skirt to fall. This totally depends on how tall you are and how long you want your skirt to be. I wanted mine to fall mid-thigh.

Turn the pillow case inside out and mark where you just measured. 

 

Cut where you just marked.

Depending on how wide your elastic is, (mine was 3/4 inch) pin down enough fabric to feed the elastic through. Don't forget your seem allowance! I pinned down 2 inches. Always remember to start pinning along the existing seem so that everything lines up.

 Finish pinning all the way around.

 Start sewing where you pinned with about 1/4 inch seem allowance. Sew all the way around the waistband.

 

You can barely see it in this photo but I double stitched around the whole skirt as well. Just to make sure it wouldn't fray.

This photo better shows the double seem.

At this point in the sewing I realized I totally forgot to leave an opening to feed the elastic through! Ha! So I did a little seem ripping right along the existing seem and started feeding it through with a safety pin pinned to the end to help get it through.

Once the elastic is fed through the waistband, overlap the 2 ends of elastic and sew up the opening, sewing the elastic along with it to secure it. I sewed over it a couple times just to make sure it would hold.

 And you're done! Here it is from the back and front again. I really enjoyed making this skirt and plan on wearing it a lot this summer!

I hope you enjoy making yours!