Blue Plaid Flannel to Sexy Pleated Micro Mini Skirt

Hello everyone !

Ever notice the ridiculous lack of lingerie refashion tutorials? No? Well, I have and I think it's a travesty that requires a quick remedy. Hopefully this will be the first of many lingerie refashions, because lingerie makes you feel beautiful and sexy and the world needs more women who feel beautiful and sexy.

I started out with this:



It's kinda big...

 



I had actually intended to turn this great flannel into a dress but I was working too fast and screwed up. After the over-enthusiastic scissor hacking there wasn't much left to work with but I loved the fabric and really felt like it needed to become something that I would love to wear. And so I thought, and thought, and finally realised how long I had been playing with the idea of refashioning some sexy somethings. Light bulb.

I pinned the two biggest section of the shirt together, I would need a long length of fabric if I was going to attempt pleating.

I had never worked with pleats before but it didn't seem to hard. I skipped tutorials and messed around with my pins and the fabric measuring out different depths and lengths of pleats until I found a look I liked and that would give me the waist measurement I needed.

 

 

 

Originally the skirt was going to be about 10 inches long, but pleating ate up so much of the material that I ended up cutting it in half to make it into a 5 inch long micro mini, definitely not suitable for work.

 

In the picture below you can kind of see how I sewed down the pleats. I created them with two rulers. One to ensure they were straight and another to measure the depth of each pleat, which was only 3cm in this case as I was working with limited fabric. Next time I make a pleated skirt the pleats will be deeper. I secured each pleat with a number of pins to make sure they were uniform. Then I sewed each pleat down about 1.5 inches with a blue thread right along the edge of the fold so it was as discreet as possible.

I decided to use the existing buttons from the shirt as fasteners for the skirt.

 

Then I cut another part of the shirt for a waist band and matched up the buttons.

 

The waist band is one strip of fabric that I folded over each side of the skirt and tucked in again so that there would be no exposed, fraying threads. 

 

I inverted the button at the top of the waist band so that it would be invisible.

I hemmed the bottom of the skirt after the pleating which is not as scary as it sounds since my pleats were only 3 cm deep. I didn't want to hem it before hand and end up with an uneven hem and just have to do it again.

And there you have it!

I'm considering making matching garters. I think I have just enough fabric.

Happy crafting!