Stella recently asked for a denim skirt, jeans style but with a pleated skirt.  Some of her requests don’tprogress past the request stage, but this one became reality!

This is her inspiration photo, from her Pinterest ‘outfits I like’ board (which is very useful for me when attempting to sew or buy clothes for her).

Once I looked at the photo I figured that I could make her a skirt from a pair of jeans! As it happened, I had a couple of small pairs of op-shopped jeans in my stash. They were originally planned for an upcycle into bags, but I wondered if one of them would work for Stella’s skirt. She tried on both pairs, claimed one pair to be worn as regular jeans (did you know that low waisted jeans were a thing again?) and said that I could transform the other.

I started off by just chopping the legs off the jeans through the crotch, just below the back pockets. This then entailed some unpicking and resewing of the bottom couple of inches of centre front and back yoke seams to straighten them out a bit. After Stella tried on the jeans yoke, she asked that it be shortened even further – rendering my unpicking and resewing redundant! I opened up each of the legs into flat fabric and cut out a length of fabric on the grainline of each one. Then I sewed the two lengths into a loop, and started on sewing maths. I subtracted the circumference of the yoke from the circumference of the skirt strip, worked out how many pleats I wanted, and then divided the difference between the two circumferences by the number of pleats to work out how deep each pleat needed to be.

Had I already mentioned low waisted jeans? As it turned out, when Stella tried on the skirt it didn’t fit according to her vision. The proportions weren’t right to wear it on her hips, but that was where it needed to go to fit properly. She yanked it up to sit at her waist, and it looked way better, other than the waist being way too large.

At first we thought that she could just wear it with a belt, but then I took a better look inside the waistband and realised that it had buttons inside it – and adjustable waist elastic! These jeans were a children’s brand! I fished around and found the elastic, and simply tightened it up until it was the right measurement for Stella. And now it’s part of her wardrobe!

Stella is an avid gamer – Minecraft, Zelda, Animal Crossing, Sims, other things I can’t remember the name of – and enjoys dressing her Sim in outfits that she’d like. I think we’ve done pretty well matching the vibe of this one!