How to Sew a Basic Skirt | Historical - Vintage – Modern

Hello and welcome to this video where I will be making a simple striped skirt. So it's summer and I think we all can relate to that feeling of realizing in the beginning of it that you don't have anything to wear. That was what I experienced at least. But thinking of the current situation in the world right now, I believe that maybe it wasn't a good idea to buy new clothing. So I thought, why not make my own? So a couple of months ago I found this fabric at a second-hand store, as usual. It's an old curtain, it's a striped curtain. And I thought that this would be perfect for a skirt. And I'm not talking about a complicated seven-gord skirt, no. I'm talking about two rectangles sewn together and pleated into a waistband. That's not complicated. And the cool thing about this is that this is actually exactly the same way as I do my historical skirts. So my 18th century skirts, my 17th century skirts, my 19th century skirts are all made in this way. And I believe you can make from other centuries as well. And also vintage skirts and modern skirts. I think this is a very perfect type of skirt. It suits so many different types of occasions and styles and time periods. So that is what I will do today. And I believe that I've already talked way too much. So I think that we should take our fabric and start. So after you've cut the fabric in the middle, you probably have two pieces in the similar size. And what we're going to do now is that we're going to cut off a little bit out of this. Because I don't have any spare fabric and I also want pockets and a waistband on this. So I need to sacrifice a little bit from one of the pieces. It's going to lay like this on me. And I want the stripes on the waistband to lie in this direction. And the same for the pocket. So the next step will be to cut off around 25 centimeters from the front piece. And after that, we are going to sew these pieces together. And this is super easy. You can do it by machine if you want, you can do it by hand if you want. Which is probably what I will be doing. So these short sides are going to be pinned together. And then I'm just going to fetch my needle and thread and sew them together using running and backstitches. But it's not really that important how you do it. When you have sewn all of your pieces together, you probably have something that looks a bit like this. And that's perfect, that's exactly how I want it. But as you may notice, it's a little bit too big in the waist. So we need to fix that. And how we will do that is that we will clip this. And there's different ways to do that. You can either just fold it, very simply, or you can do cartridge pleating, or you can do a mixture of those pleats, or you can do other types of pleats, there's really no limit to this. However, I think that I will leave my front quite plain, and then I will have my pleats in the back a little bit deeper and smaller, because in that way I can have more volume there. But that's just something that I personally will do. So as I have said like a hundred times in this video, you can do it however you like. When you're happy with how your pleating looks, we're going to return to the little strip of fabric that we cut out earlier. And what we'll do with that strip is, as I mentioned earlier, partly a waistband. And to be able to do a waistband, you will need certain measurements. And I think it goes without saying that you will need the measurement of your waist. That is needed. But you also need another measurement, and that is how wide I want my waistband to be. So if I, for example, want a waistband that is 5cm wide, and I need to double that, because we need a folded waistband, and then I also need some room for seam allowance. So with this example, I would need to cut out a 12cm wide strip of fabric. So that is what I will do, and then I will pin that to my upper pleated part of the skirt. But, and this is important, I forgot to tell you something earlier. Which is basically that you need, apart from wearing your skirt, also need to be able to put it on. Which you won't be right now. So what we need to do is take one of the sides, and then rip apart the seam in the upper part of the skirt. And there's different ways to do this. You can either put a zipper there, you can put some buttons there, or hooks and eyes. You can tie it together, there's different ways to do this. I would suggest to start with 10, 15, or 20cm. It very much depends on how wide hips you have, but it's a very important step, and should maybe have been done earlier in the process, but it's still fine. It's a sunny but windy day today, and I thought that we actually could try to finish the skirt. There's a few more things that we need to do. For example, the closure. You can do the closure in different ways. I was thinking about doing hooks and eyes, but I actually didn't have any right now, so I thought that I actually could just try and close it with some buttons. So I'm just going to put the skirt on and see where I need to place everything, and then doing the last stitches on the waistband. And then, if you have a sewing machine, you can then create, in a quite easy way, buttonholes. I don't have a sewing machine here, so I need to do it by hand, and I'm not good at doing buttonholes by hand. We'll see how that will go. pockets, like pockets into the skirt. But the stripes were such a fun aspect to play around with, so I decided to go with patch pockets instead. So I took the little scrap of fabric that I had left, and tried to make two pockets out of that, but they became a little bit too small for my taste. So in the end, I got to piece together two bigger pockets. Because I can't do a single project without piecing, apparently. So the result, in the end, became two big patch pockets in the front of the skirt. I'm actually very happy with this skirt. I think it turned out very well. I think it both serves as a practical, but also cute and vintage-y skirt. So I think I will use this very, very much. And I also really, really hope you liked the video, and please let me know if you are interested in more videos like this, because it was very, very fun to make. So now I will put this skirt on, and let you see the result.