I Made a Skirt From an Old Quilt
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In the fall, my mom gave me this old quilt top that her quilting club received as a donation, because she thought I might want to make a skirt out of it.
I love doing this kind of stuff and one of the main reasons I wanted to start sewing as an adult was so that I could upcycle old unwanted clothes, or bedding into new clothing.
I like this idea for two reasons: number 1, fast fashion has absolutely destroyed the clothing industry, and the quality of clothing and the fabrics that are made today are pretty terrible, compared to what they were up until the 80s, maybe early 90s. New clothing falls apart so quickly, and clothes used to last for years.
If you go into a thrift store nowadays, you can still find clothing from the 80s and before that time, but anything made after that, is either in a landfill, or soon will be after a handful of uses.
The second reason I like the idea of upcycling vintage clothing and fabrics is to keep these quality materials from going into a landfill.
I wasn't fully in love with all the colors that the quilt top is composed of, but I wanted to preserve all the hard work that the quilter had put into it. If you look at the stitches, you can see that everything was done by hand, so she spent hours upon hours making this piece.
It's also made in the original style of quilting, which I have great respect for. It's from a time when people would take scrap materials, and old clothing, they'd cut them into pieces and they'd sew them together to create something new.
I'm still relatively new to sewing, so instead of trying to figure the design out on my own, I used a wrap skirt that I have as a pattern, in order to get the fabric to lay correctly.
Like an original quilter, I had to take pieces from around the quilt, and sew them together at the sides, in order to complete the full wrap skirt pattern.
Some of the fabric scraps had worn out, so I had to remove and replace a couple of the squares, to make sure my skirt wasn't full of holes.
And then after I did that, I cleaned up the back a bit and ironed on a fusible interfacing, to strengthen the fabric in order for it to last longer.
The belt at the top, that ties together the skirt, I made from scrap pieces that I had leftover from when I cut out the skirt.
Overall, I'm super happy with how it turned out. The project was a lot of fun and also really fulfilling. The woman who started this quilt is likely long gone, but her work didn't go to waste. She probably couldn't even imagine that a random woman would some day turn her quilt top into a skirt, to be worn for years on end.
Hi, I’m Kristen!
I envision a world where you and I rediscover what it is to be human, through connection with ourselves, each other and the natural world around us.