The Cauliflower Skirt (a tutorial)

Ok, so why cauliflower? Well I’ve been making cauliflower and leek soup. I’ve been battered by recurrent colds for the last couple of months and have gone a massive fruit and veg binge! So my whole house smelled like cauliflower while I pieced together this skirt. Hence, the Cauliflower Skirt!

I read a post a few weeks ago at A Fashionable Stitch called The Everyday Wardrobe. In a nut shell, it’s about turning those Never Worn Garments (NWGs) into Everyday Wardrobe Garments (EWGs). Which got me to thinking of all of the stuff in my wardrobe that I very rarely wear. So I had a little looksy and I found these:

They’re really unflattering and they creep down my behind when I sit. The shape is just all wrong. They were just bunched up at the back of one of my shelves, hence the wrinkles!

Winter is coming (pfft, I don’t read Game of Thrones!) – and I’m a skirt, tights and boots (+ appropriate upper garments!) type of gal…so I set about making a nice skirt.

The first thing I did was stand in front of the mirror with my pants and worked out what length I wanted my skirt to be and marked this with a pin. Then I took a few inches off that measurement, knowing I wanted to add a band at the bottom. I pinned just under the waistband, making sure that the front and back were aligned (pink pins). Then it was cutting time!

Then it was seam ripping time! I unpicked the seams between the legs all of the way and the front and back seams I had to unpick until the curve stopped. I’ll show you what I mean:

Should look like this:

Alrighty. I folded the skirt in half at the centre front and back, matching the two side seams in the middle. These I pinned.

That was to keep things even when I sewed the new centre front and back seams. This is where I sewed:

…and then turned out the right way it looks like a mini skirt!

Then I made the band for the bottom from one of the trouser legs. I cut two large rectangles and put them right sides together to sew, thus forming a loop. I wanted the width of this to be less than my skirt and reduce the difference using gathers. I had to be careful here, if I made the band too narrow I wouldn’t be able to walk or it would ride up if I did manage! So I took a few steps down my hallway (walking normally), stopped and measured how far apart my legs would be at the desired skirt length. Make sense?

This is the band, sewn at the sides.

Then doubled over and pressed it looked like this

Now, because the band is much narrower than the skirt…

…I had to do some gathering. This I achieved by sewing long gathering stitches and pulling the bobbin threads until the side seams on both the skirt and band matched up.

Then it was just a matter of evening out the gathers, throwing in a few pins and sewing the thing on!

That’s it! Only took a few hours – in between attending to children and cooking my soup – and was quite a simple project.