Jeans to Minis

That phrase "growing like a weed"?  I'll modify, and say our girl is growing like a tulip on a warm May afternoon.  And though this tulip's legs keep stretching, her little hips aren't keeping up.  Why don't they make longs in kid sizes?  She needs a 4 long.  We have a drawer full of size 6 jeans that still need to be cinched ridiculously at the waist, but are reaching that point where they've gone from cute to.....not. 

Pinterest to the rescue.  Last year I pinned a MaryJanes and Goloshes blog post on repurposing an outgrown pair of jeans to a miniskirt.  This week I picked up a few dollars worth of cotton in fun colors, and followed the blogger's instructions.  Super easy.  Super fast.  Super cute!  My instructions below are what worked for me, but follow the MaryJanes and Goloshes blog post for more specific instructions if you wish. 

I chose a pair of jeans that were definitely looking short for my trial run.  I really wanted to make sure the pockets were kept intact, so I used my plastic quilting ruler to cut off the legs of the jeans below the pockets, but above the crotch.  Sorry, there isn't a nicer word.  That's really what that part of jeans is called.

   

I had our girl slip them on at this point, then measured from the raw edge to the point on her leg where I wanted the bottom of the skirt to reach.  This is a 'mini' skirt, but I didn't want it to be too mini.  That ended up being 5 inches for her, so I cut one strip 5" wide, and the other strip 3" wide.

MJ & G recommended cutting each strip to a length of four times the front of the raw edge of the jean skirt.  Since I wanted the stripes to be vertical, I wasn't able to do that; this fabric had a width of about 48" so that's what I went with; one 5" strip of 48", and one 3" strip of 48".  Each strip gets hemmed on one side, then the raw edges on the other side are lined up and sewn together with a very loose running stitch so you can pull the threads to gather the material into ruffles.  I found at this point I needed to do a lot of comparing with the raw edges of the skirt to know when I'd ruffled it too much or not enough.

When it seemed ruffled tight enough so it would go around the bottom of the denim with no gaps or surplus, I sewed the left side of the strips to the right side (good sides together) so it made a circle of ruffled fabric BUT I made sure not to sew those loose threads at the top so I could still pull on them to tighten the ruffles or let them out. 

I pinned the ruffle circle to the denim, good sides together.  And of course, didn't take a picture for you.  Sorry.  MJ&G has one. This all took about a half hour.  And our jeans now look like this:

(She is so dang beautiful, even with a wildly messy braid and tomato soup on her sleeve!)  This project was so fast and turned out so well, I'm definitely going to be hacking off the legs of some of her other jeans.  Next sewing project = maxi skirts!