Hello! Welcome to Make Thrift Buy! This is the show where you send in clothes that you’ve
seen on the internet and then I try my best to recreate them.
For a while now, I’ve been really wanting to make myself some longer-length skirts that
are both flattering but also really comfy, so when Cassie - last name withheld - sent
in this photo of this skirt – from NastyGal – I thought, perfect. I’m going to try
and make myself a jersey skirt with slits in the side.
I then hopped onto Pinterest and I found so many more cute side-slit skirts, some with
two slits, some with just one - I think the one that I'm going to make is just going to
have one. Anyway I immediately wanted to learn how to make one for myself, because, it actually
looks like a pretty simple piece to construct, so it shouldn’t be too hard to recreate
for myself – right?
Okay so before we get to the DIY: Real talk. This week is Fashion Revolution week, which
is a week dedicated to scrutinizing the fashion world, it’s practices, its ethics (or lack
of), it’s sustainability, and also to examine our own relationships with fashion. It started
after a clothing factory in Bangladesh collapsed in 2011 and killed thousands of people.
So many of the clothes that we see in our stores are made in… really bad conditions,
like the factory that collapsed in Bangladesh. Unsafe factories, underpaid workers… In
addition, clothing is also pretty bad for the environment.
It's estimated that 80 billion items of clothing are delivered out of factories annually worldwide.
Also the amount of water that it takes to make a t-shirt? 2720 litres. That’s how
much water you drink over a period of 3 years! Clothing consumption, that is, the clothes
you buy per household on average per year, uses up 1.5 tonnes of carbon – which is
the equivalent of driving 6000 cars.
What the heck.
So this is one of the major reasons that I either make my own clothes or mainly shop
at thrift stores. Lately, I’ve also been wondering how I can
make my impact on the world even less in my sewing, because fabrics, even cottons, still
take up quite a lot of energy to produce, and it’s often super hard to find out where
the cotton was even grown – was it picked using slave labour, how fairly are the people
who are weaving and dying the fabrics being paid.
So, in this episode I’m actually going to be using ThreadInternational Fabrics to make
my skirt. So, right up I’m going to disclaim that this fabric was sent to me for free to
try out, but all of the opinions about it are going to be MY OWN. So what’s awesome
about this fabric is: half of it is made out of plastic. RECYCLED PLASTIC BOTTLES. Which
is so cool, and it also reduces the amount of water needed to make the fabric, and provides
jobs for unemployed people in Haiti who are the ones who collect the plastic bottles and
also convert it to useful stuff that can be made into fabrics. I wanna know the science
behind that, it's pretty cool. Anyway, ThreadInternational are the most dedicated company I’ve ever
come across in making sure that they address issues like slave labour and child labour,
at the place where most clothing brands have no transparency at all – the source materials
– and then all the way up through all stages of production of the fabrics. They are completely
transparent about how their material is made, which unfortunately is a total rarity in the
fashion world. So – shoutout to ThreadInternational for being awesome – seriously, they’re
one of the coolest companies I’ve ever come across.
So anyway – let’s get started!
First things first, I needed to figure out what TYPE of skirt that I wanted to make.
There’s a few types of skirts that’d work for this design but I wanted the skirt to
be really flowy and fall just below my knee, so I decided on a quarter circle skirt. Now
it’s called a quarter circle skirt, because, well, the pattern is made from a quarter of
a full circle.
Basically, you just take this quarter of the circle and you make a skirt shape out of it
using just 2 measurements, which we will get to in a second.
And this is what you end up with: a skirt piece and a waistband piece.
So the two measurements that I needed to take for the circle skirt was:
1. my waist measurement. and 2. The desired length of the skirt.
Now It’s time for some mathematics! But don’t worry, I’ll make this as painless
as possible, so you just have to plug in your own measurements into the following equations.
First, the inner circle. My waist measurement was 30 inches. Plug in
your own waist measurement, cm or inches both work in the following equation.
So I took my waist measurement, multiplied this by 4, and then I added a 1/2 seam allowance
on both sides of the circle, so, basically, add one inch to this measurement.
Then, I divided this number by 2 x pi, which is 6.28. So I divided one hundred and twenty
one by six-point-two-eight.
This gave me an inner circle measurement of 19.2 inches.
And finally, because I’m going to be using stretchy jersey fabric, I’m going to take
away approximately 3 inches from this measurement to allow for the stretch. So I rounded this
down to 16. Now, exactly how much you will take away will depend on how stretchy your
fabric is, but it’s better to take away more, and end up with a smaller inner circle
to start off with, because you can always cut this circle larger later on.
Anyway, this final 16 inches gives me my INNER CIRCLE RADIUS.
Next is the outer circle measurement. I wanted the length of my skirt to be 27 inches,
so that it would fall just below my knee, but again you can replace whatever skirt length
you want into the following equation:
So, 27 is my desired length. I added the inner circle measurement to this,
giving me 43, and then I subtracted the waistband, which
I’m going to add later, which I want to be 2 inches wide, so I subtract 2, giving
me 41.
And then finally if you want to add hemming allowance, add half an inch, but you don’t
have to hem if you’re using stretchy fabric – I didn’t bother to add a hem allowance
on mine.
So my outer circle is 41 inches.
So to recap, on this quarter circle the inner circle radius will be 16 inches, and the outer
circle radius will be 41 inches.
Next, I wanted to draw this quarter circle onto real-life paper, so I stuck a couple
of sheets of butchers paper together and then I drew both the inner and outer circle measurements
out from THIS corner of the paper, using a tape-measure, like this.
And remember that I said I wanted to add a waistband?
Well, we will leave that part to later.
Anyway, I cut out this quarter circle of the paper, and I also gave the paper a little
iron just to make it go a little bit more flat, using a low heat setting, and then…
well… I left it on the ground and… my dog got to it; she thought it was a great
place to go to the bathroom. Kindaaaa my bad, I think she thought that it was a
puppy house-training pad.
Annika [on camera]: Ella! (laughs) It's okay, I forgive you! I just think it's really funny!
Awwwhh (laughs). Oh man.
So, I repeated all of that again and I made a second paper pattern.
Next, I opened up my ThreadInternational Fabric! I got the Heather Grey Jersey, which is one-way
stretch, annnnd first I pre-washed the fabric in cold water – now this is a non-essential
but I think important thing to do when you’re sewing new fabrics, wash them first if you
want them to come out really nicely in the end – so, yeah, I popped it in the washing
machine – and yep. I added way too much soap. Because I super know how to adult.
Luckily my washing machine DIDN’T explode with soap suds, and after the fabric was all
dried I put it down onto my cutting mat, with the stretch of the fabric going in this direction
….
Annika [on camera]: Noooo no no no no no okay…
...And placed the pattern down onto the corner of the fabric, and then I used it to cut out
an identical-shaped piece of fabric.
Now because I’m using jersey fabric, the edges of the fabric like to roll over, so
to get them to stop doing that I sprayed on a little bit of SprayStarch and I ironed the
edges flat.
OH! And the scraps of fabric from the inner circle here, they are going into my scrap
fabric pile – I’ve stopped throwing out fabric scraps, because this is hella wasteful,
and I’m going to do a project with all of my scraps really soon!
ANYWAY back to the skirt – I thought it’d be a good idea to make sure that the skirt
is the right size, so I wrapped it around my waist and YEP – it’ll fit perfectly.
Now it’s important to try it on before you sew because different stretchy fabrics differ
in their “stretchiness” – and I’ll give you tips for fixing it if it doesn’t
fit perfectly after you've cut it all out in just a second.
So, I then laid the skirt down and I folded it in half like this, right-sides-together.
The next thing that I will do is to sew part-way down this side to join the edges together
and give it a side slit.
Now: if your fabric wasn’t as stretchy as mine and your skirt is a bit too small – you
just need to cut out the inner circle a little bit bigger.
OR if it was a little bit too big, meaning your fabric was stretchier than mine – you’ll
need to sew it with a larger seam allowance, which basically just means, sew it further
in from the edge.
Okay, so this is where the side-split - slit? I don't know, I use them interchangeably - comes
in as well. I wanted a fairly big side-slit, so I only
sewed 10.5 inches down this side. The longer your line of stitches, the smaller the split
will be.
To sew the fabrics together I used a regular zig-zag stitch, a ball-point needle and a
normal sewing foot, although a walking foot would definitely help here, and I was very
careful not to stretch either of the fabrics. Now this is important because you’re sewing
against the stretch on one edge, and with the stretch on the other, so using lots of
pins or clips, and making sure that you don’t stretch either of the fabrics while sewing
is very important here.
I then tried the skirt on again to make sure everything fit alright. Remember there’s
also going to be a waistband above this so it needed to fit on the lower waist, and there’s
the side-slit there – which I am now going to hem the edges of.
To hem the edges of the side-slit, and this is optional, because jersey fabric won’t
fray, I just wanted to do it for aesthetic reasons, I folded them in about half an inch,
same as the seam allowance for the other stitches, and then I sewed down each edge of the slit
like this.
Now onto the waistband! I cut out a rectangle from the fabric that’s
5 inches wide and 33 inches long. The length is my waist measurement, plus 3
inches, just to be on the safe side – and because I wanted a 2-inch waistband I made
it 5 inches wide, adding ½ an inch seam allowance to both the top and the bottom.
I folded the waistband in half lengthways like this, and I sewed down this edge, using
a zig-zag stitch.
Then to get the correct waistband size – and I’m doing this because as I said before,
all stretchy fabrics all differ in their stretchiness and actually trying it on rather than just
measuring everything will give you the best fit – I wrapped it around my waist and I
figured out where I’d need to sew by seeing where the pieces of fabric met on my waist.
So, I’m going to sew the waistband together HERE.
I then cut off the excess fabric, and now I have a waistband loop.
I lined this waistband up with the top of the skirt, raw edge facing up, and then I
quartered both of these with pins. This means that I put 4 evenly-spaced pins into both
the waistband, and 4 evenly-spaced pins into the top raw edge of the skirt.
I then placed the waistband around the outside on top of the skirt, matching up the pins
and the raw edges of both the waistband and the skirt's edge, and finally I'm going to
be sewing them together like this, all the way around the waist, to attach them to each
other.
Now, I'll go into this process a little more closely here over at my sewing machine – the
waistband is on top of the skirt, both are right-sides-together, and then I start at
one set of pins, and, match up the next set of pins before sewing. Because you're trying
to match up each set of pins it might mean that you need to stretch either the waistband
or the skirt a little bit more than the other. And then, using a zig-zag stitch I carefully
sewed along the edge towards the next set of pins. When I got to that next set of pins,
I removed them, lined up the next set of pins, and so on, until I’d sewn the waistband
on all the way around the skirt.
Then I flipped the waistband up and it looked like this.
And again I’m not bothering to hem the bottom of my skirt because it won’t fray and it
looks fine.
And now that I’m done it’s time to see: how did I go?
[Music plays]
GUYS! I know I say this every time time but - I am so, so happy with how this skirt turned
out! It is both comfy, flattering, stylish and super-responsibly-made! This is my personal
DIY goals, right here.
[Scissor snipping sound effect]
I still can’t believe that it's made out
of 50% plastic bottles – and it’s so soft and comfortable?! It doesn’t get sticky
or hot like other arcrylic fabrics, like polyester, either.
Witchcraft – Threadinternational – witchcraft.
Again if you want to grab some of this fabric for yourself, to make your own skirt or to
use in any of the many other stretchy fabric tutorials that I've uploaded onto this channel
– use the code FASHREV10 at checkout to get 10% off any of the fabrics.
And also, let me know how you’re going to acknowledge Fashion Revolution Week yourself.
Maybe you can organize a thrift shopping trip with friends that have never gone thrift shopping
before, or go for the first time yourself, or turn your clothes inside out to show the
label then post them on social media to ask the brand who sold it: who made my clothes?
Or maybe you’ll just finally finish that sewing project that’s been sitting in a
dark, dank corner for... years. There’s a lot of ways you can get involved – you
can go to this website here – I’m not sponsored at all by these guys, I just think
they’re doing some amazing work for the world and I think it’s super worthwhile
checking them out.
Anyway, thank you so much for watching, give this video a thumbs up if you enjoyed it AND
I’ll see you all next time. And don’t worry – I haven’t forgotten about episode
53-and-a-half – that’ll be one of the next ones that I upload here.
So, Bye! [Silly voice] Byeee! Oh no. No. We don't want to wave. We want to go for a W-A-L-K.
Alright. Let's go. Let's go for a walk.
Thank you to all of my supporters on Patreon for making these video possible. To become
my Patreon supporter go to patreon.com/annikavictoria!