Skirtin' the Issue

The issue is that we have had two skirts in our to-sew pile for ages.  But last weekend after a rousing round of "I have nothing to wear to church!!!" 100% not true of course, we finally made time to take them in so they could be put in rotation.

Here are the skirts in their former state on two of the girls:

Too big.

 

And too big.

The top one is a J. Crew hand-me-down from a friend and the other I found at a thrift store and bought because I liked the pattern.

It's ridiculous how long it took me to tackle these for the girls considering how easy it was to do.  There was no taking out seams or taking apart and restructuring involved - just sewing a few stitches along the waistband of each to "tighten" them.

Psst...I sewed these with my sewing machine but you could easily hand sew skirts this way using a running stitch.  Here's a video showing just how to do that stitch (it's the first stitch she demonstrates).

First, we determined how much we needed to take them in.  I'll use the black and white skirt as an example.  It was about 8 inches too big for G around her waist.  So, I turned the skirt inside out and simply "pinched" about two inches of waistband together in four places around the top of the skirt then sewed a straight stitch just down the waistband to keep the pinch in place.  This is what the top of the skirt looked like after the pinches were sewn:  

Then, so the pinches weren't moving around as the dress was worn, I folded them over along the waistband and sewed another straight stitch down the waistband to hold them in place. 

The skirt now has four small pleats that make it flare a little more vs. being the straight skirt it once was.  But more importantly, it now fits the seven year old perfectly.

The black floral skirt has a zipper in the back but I did the same thing - measured, pinched, sewed - and it just goes on by unzipping and zipping just as it normally would.

The cool thing about taking in skirts this way is that, as the girls grow, we can take those pinches out and readjust them - make them smaller or have less pinches - so the skirt grows with them.  Make sense?

The only problem I think we'll run into knowing this easy peasy take-in method is that we'll want all the too-big skirts to do this to.  Thrifting has never been so fun.  *Insert nervous laugh*  We'll soon have skirts coming out our ears.  :)

Happy Thursday!