SKIRTING THE ISSUE

At the County Show last month, I bought some new clothes from an ethnic clothing stand, including a long multi-coloured tiered skirt made from 80 percent silk. Absolutely gorgeous, except that it had a deep shirred band at the top, and I really don’t like this style. I bought a good long length of 1/4 inch wide elastic from Ebay, ready to alter this skirt.

I have several Indian skirts which have an elasticated waistband with a drawstring, and I much prefer this as you can wear a top tucked in if you want. I decided to cut off this shirred part, and create a band from the top layer of the skirt, which would have the advantage of shortening the skirt a bit, as it was too long.

The piece I have cut off has some normal elastic along the top edge. It is now a rectangular piece and I have pulled the shirring elastic out slightly and tied the ends together in pairs, so that they don’t get pulled out. I am intending to add more normal elastic along the bottom edge, and join it back into a tube and create a head band out of it.

I removed the label and the hanging loops and set them aside to re-attach to the skirt once I’d finished altering it.

As the fabric is very lightweight, I ironed on a strip of interfacing on the inside of the top. I found instructions in my sewing machine manual for creating an eyelet (a bit like a circular buttonhole) which I made in the centre front of the band. Unfortunately the largest size available was 1/4 inch but this was just large enough to thread the drawstring through eventually. When the stitching was done, I used the punch accessory that came with the machine to remove the fabric from the centre of the eyelet. Once the eyelet was complete, I created a 1 1/2 inch hem over the interfacing and machined this in place, and added two more rows of machine stitching to create three casings, with a final row of top-stitching along the top edge.

Using a safety pin attached to the end of a length of the 1/4 inch wide elastic, I threaded this through the casings and sewed the ends together. The final step was to thread a long black boot lace through the middle casing, passing it through the eyelet at the centre front of the band.

This is the finished result, and I am pleased with how it turned out. This skirt is now much more wearable as far as I am concerned!

Here I am wearing it, with Ruby photobombing the picture!

I knew that I had one other Indian skirt whose elastic had “gone,” and going through my wardrobe, I found that there was another one in the same state, so I decided to replace the elastic in both of these skirts. This proved a lot easier to do than the new skirt, because once I’d opened the seam in the band and exposed the “gone” elastic, I was able to cut this, and temporarily sew it onto the end of the replacement. When I pulled out the old elastic, it pulled the new one into its place. Once each length of elastic was through, all I had to do was sew the ends together, and re-sew the seam in the band to complete the job. Both these skirts have drawstrings. One of them is a bit worn, so I shall replace this once I get around to buying some more black boot laces.

Here are the other two skirts with their bands re-elasticated.

All ready for the summer! They are lovely and cool to wear. Both of these skirts are very old, and it will be lovely to wear them with more comfortable bands on the top.