How To Make Great Recycled Skirts

Making your own clothes can be easier than you think, especially if you do it by recycling other cast-off clothing to do it. One of the most simple things you can sew is a skirt. But if the thought of picking fabric and a pattern is intimidating for you, why not try making a recycled skirt?  By choosing to recycle some sort of clothing into another, you are keeping materials out of landfills, saving costs on what you'd need to buy to make your skirt and saving time and labor by using something that's already been sewn.

A really fun way to make a recycled skirt is from an old pair of jeans. You can use jeans that you have at home, or you can go out and look for a pair or two at your local thrift store.

Another fun way to make your own skirt is by using men's neckties! This guarantees that your skirt will be one-of-a-kind.

People started recycling blue jeans into skirts in the late 1960s and early 1970s and it's still a great way to make a a really fun skirt for yourself. To start, decide how long a skirt you want to make. If you want to make a mini skirt, you will need one pair of blue jeans. If you want to make an ankle length skirt, you will want to look for one pair of jeans that has flared legs and a second pair that is the same color for needed extra material. The jeans need to fit you in the waist and hips. You can do blue jeans, or black ones, or anything where you find enough material to work with.

What you are going to do is take a seam ripper or pair of scissors and cut the jeans open along the inside leg seams. If you are making a mini skirt, cut the legs off to be about two inches longer than you want and then cut open the inside seams. The open legs get sewn together to make the skirt and any extra leg material you cut off is used to make pieces to fill in any of the skirt area if the legs aren't full enough, or to make patches to fix any really worn areas. The skirt already has a zipper and pockets built-in from being a pair of jeans, so you don't have to do that part at all!

For a long skirt, it's really nice if you can find flare leg jeans as that can let you make a skirt with fullness at the bottom, also known as an A-line skirt. To get enough material to join the legs into a skirt you sometimes need a second pair of jeans to get enough fill material that's in long pieces. All this will vary depending on your clothing size and the cut of the jeans. Full-cut or baggy legs work better for this sort of thing than pencil leg jeans.

A really fun way to make a recycled skirt is from men's ties! Depending on your size and how long or how full you want your skirt to be, you'll need two to four dozen ties. A good way to get a lot of ties is to find thrift stores that sell by the pound. This lets you really get a lot of ties for cheap.

It helps to pick a defining or dominant color for the skirt. Whatever color you pick, you want all the ties to have some of this color. That's one way to  get so many different patterns to work together.  Or you might choose all stripes, or all paisley, or all golf patterns.  Go see what you can find and what catches your fancy.

For this skirt, the ties are sewn together along their long sides.  You'll want to sew from the wider (bottom) end of the tie back towards the narrow end.  This gives you an even skirt hem as you can always trim off any longer bits from the top end.  The hem will already be finished and pointy.  Leaving the ties long makes an A-line skirt as ties naturally get wider along their lengths.  If you wish to have a mini skirt, you measure from the bottom to the top, as long as you wish and then trim off the extra.  You'll have to sew a waistband at that point.  Putting a side or back zipper into a skirt like this is really easy as the tie edges are perfectly finished and you just sew the zipper into a seam right where you want it to be!