Out With The Old…

January 5, 2015

The New Year has begun and, with it, a chance to start fresh.  The trouble is that I’m still coughing and hacking from the virus I picked up just before Christmas.  Although I feel much better than I did last week, I haven’t felt like doing much of anything.  But, looking on the bright side, I know this will pass so I’m just going with the flow until things get back to normal.

My mind has been churning with things I want/need to do when I get the energy to do them.  Charming gave me three new pairs of jeans for Christmas so that means that I either need to throw three pair of my old jeans in the trash or figure out how I can turn them into something useful.  Anyone who knows me well will tell you that I find it very hard to justify throwing anything away.  I guess it’s part of my mountain heritage mentality to “use it up, wear it out, and then turn it into something new”.  I’ve already decided to turn one pair of the old jeans into a clothes pin bag.  I just need to come up with a creative way to attach the cut-off jeans to a clothes hanger.

I have also been giving some thought to turning another pair of the jeans into a skirt as I’ve seen other people do.  In my fabric stash, I found some pretty blue flowered cotton fabric that I had purchased several years ago for a temporary project at work.  I cut the legs off the old pair of jeans, then I used the legs to cut four equal-sized pieces that were narrow at one end and flared at the other end.  I’m thinking that a below-the-knee, flared or A-line skirt would look best.  I will probably need to cut the legs off of the third pair of old jeans in order to have enough pieces to go all around this skirt.  Below are pictures of the pieces to the skirt as well as shots showing the skirt as it should look when I sew it together. 

Hopefully, I will have the skirt assembled with final pictures by next week.  Feel free to leave me your comments or suggestions for improvement.

The pieces to the skirt that I'm going to make, using an old pair of
jeans and some blue flowered fabric.  (Top:  jeans that have been
cut off, leaving the front and back pockets intact;
Middle:  the blue flowered fabric cut into long wedge-shaped sections;
Bottom:  wedge-shaped sections cut from the legs of the blue jeans.
Top right is a strip of maroon fabric that I also found in my fabric stash.)

The skirt as it should appear after it has been assembled.
I may add different kinds of trim along the seams, but not
positive about that yet.  I may also switch to three strips of
the flowered fabric with only two strips of the blue jeans.
This would make it more colorful and I might not need to
use the legs of the third pair of old jeans, freeing them up for
another project.