Long and unwearable to short and cute (with a tutorial!)

Look at the fabric of this skirt! Once again I grabbed something in a charity shop that didn’t fit because the fabric was so lovely. It’s too small in the waist, to long, there is a button missing and some of the fabric is torn around where the buttons were sewn on. Apart from that, it’s gorgeous!

Fleurs, fleurs, fleurs, Les Anemones!

First thing I did was remove the waistband – sometimes that’s all you need to do to ease a tight skirt. If you have a skirt that is too small, you can lay a skirt you have (that fits you well) on top of your too-small skirt to see how much of the waist you need to remove to make it fit.

Once you’ve removed your waistband, normally you can just hem the top and say-no-more but this fabric is a little flimsy and I wanted the waist to be a little more substantial.
I traced the curve of the waistband onto fusible interfacing and cut a piece an inch wide. I ironed this onto the top edge of the skirt.

Now you need to fold down your waistband and sew. Because it is cut on a curve, I needed to do a bit of snipping…

And then iron it down…

and sew…

If you are feeling fancy, you can ignore this last step and trace the line of your new waistband onto some stiffer fabric and cut it a strip an inch or so wide to make a facing. You can then sew this to the skirt face-to-face, fold it to the back and hem neatly. This way would be much neater on the inside and you could use something contrasty and exciting! I’m a bit lazier than that though.
Because I had cut off the top button on the waistband I needed to add another and this meant another buttonhole. I won’t bore you with a how-to because the interweb is littered with them.

Et voila, it fits!

And after cutting it down to knee length and a hemming session later…

I love my new summer skirt, now if we could only get some warmer weather!
Beccy