Picking Fabric for Clothing Alterations

Series Summary

Sewing is an ancient craft that still has remarkable relevance in today's modern world. The art of stitching and assembling pieces of fabric together either by hand or with the use of a modern sewing machine is still a valuable skill and can be used for industry, home, or artistic purposes. Industrial sewing is usually done with the use of machines, but for seamstresses, alteration givers, and most casual sewers, an old fashioned needle and thread is still incredibly useful and more often than not the desired method since it enables far more detail. Tailoring and dressmaking require not only a needle and thread, but also other tools and materials that you can find easily at arts and crafts stores.

Sometimes we grow tired of the same old clothes, and although they may still fit, we just need a change. In this free video series, you'll see how to turn a pair of shorts into a skirt with simple instructions. From picking the fabric to cutting, measuring, and attaching gore inserts, you'll learn every step on the way to making a new skirt! With a little bit of sewing, hemming, and patchwork, you'll be on your way to making all kinds of clothing alterations. Forget about being bored with your wardrobe, and follow these video instructions and techniques!.

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina and welcome to Expert Village. The first step is to select two fabrics that will work together for this project. So you want to go ahead and pick out an old pair of pants, or a pair of shorts, or anything that you don't really use anymore and you're going to turn it into a skirt. So, when you're trying it on, you want to make sure that it fits you where you would want a skirt to hang. Sometimes people like wearing their jeans high, but they wouldn't necessarily wear a skirt high, so you want to pick something that fits you right where you would want a skirt to fit. It doesn't matter how it looks on your legs, all you care about is the waistline. So you pick a waistline that's comfortable for you and then you pick a fabric that you're going to insert into your skirt. And what you do, when you pick out a fabric, keep in mind that all we're going to do, we're going to take our fabric and we're going to cut a triangle and we're going to sew it into your pants, or your shorts. So you have to make sure that the fabric you pick is tall enough to fit. You can see that this is a perfect fit. Now if you are doing a very long pair of pants and you're turning them into a skirt, what you can do is you can pick a fabric that doesn't have a design on it that's facing the short way, and you can just take a plain color or a color that can be placed any way and that you're going to do it like this. Any way that you do it, you just want to make sure that you do have fabric that's long enough to fit inside of your shorts. And you also want to make sure that it's the same weight. These shorts are made of a very light, stretchy fabric and because they are I'm going to use this very light stretchy fabric to put in the middle. You don't want to use anything that's lighter than the shorts. Say that these shorts were made out of denim and I was going to use this same fabric. Once I put it inside, what's going to happen is, because these two outer pieces are heavier they're going to fold inward and you're going to have a very strange according looking thing and you don't want that. Also, if you use a fabric that's heavier, it's going to hang forward and this is going to pulling in. So you want to make sure that you use two fabrics that are about the same weight."