National Craft Month: How to Sew a Petal Skirt

As experts and enthusiasts of all things crafty, FaveCrafts decided to host a special National Craft Month blog series for all of our lovely readers. Check back for a new blog post every day featuring our favorite projects, new craft videos, how-to’s from the FaveCrafts editors, and a GIGANTIC, ENORMOUS, AMAZING craft giveaway at the end of the month. That’s right–we’re giving away the biggest prize ever, a gift basket chock full of crafting goodies from our craft closet. There’s something for everyone in this gift basket.

Leave a comment below, and on any blog post labeled “National Craft Month” in the headline, and your comment will count as an entry into the giveaway. You are free to comment as often as once per blog post (for a total of 31 chances to win!). At the end of the month, we’ll pool all of the comments together and pick one lucky winner.

My sewing project this month was to sew a petal skirt, an idea I adapted from the Rose Petal Dress tutorial. I made a feathered skirt for New Year’s Eve that everyone called my “Black Swan skirt,” so this petal skirt can be my White Swan skirt!

If you want to make the Black Swan skirt, check out …Love Maegan’s tutorial!

And if you want to make the White Swan skirt, read on!

Materials:

• XL white T-shirt from Salvation Army
• Rose petals from the dollar store

Total cost of this project: $2.60

Instructions:

1. First lay your T-shirt flat and cut off the bottom for your skirt piece. Cut a piece that’s long enough to make a skirt. It’s always a good idea to measure it against a skirt you already own that’s a length you like. Your skirt piece will be a tube that already has a hem, so you hardly have any work to do!
2. Sew the petals onto the skirt piece. I just placed one petal at a time and sewed them in a straight line, one next to the other.
   
3. Keep sewing and sewing and sewing (and sewing) until the whole tube is covered with petals. I sewed the top row upside down and ironed them down, so that the stitching wouldn’t show.
   
   

   Here they are all ironed down

4. Next, make a waist band. So far almost everything I’ve made has used an elastic waistband, so I wanted to branch out (a little!) and try to make a waistband out of just T-shirt material. I made this “yoga-style waistband,” as shown on Make It and Love It. First, I measured a pair of my pants that have a similar waistband.
   

   Remember gauchos?!

5. Next, cut more fabric from your thrifted T-shirt to use as your waistband. I made mine 6 inches wide (to ultimately make a 3 inch waistband). The length of your material is the length around your waist, or the length I measured from my gauchos!
   
6. Sew this fabric into a tube, then fold the tube in half over itself so that the wrong sides are facing each other.
   
7. Since my T-shirt was so large, my skirt piece was too big to fit around my waist, so I had to gather the top of it a bit. Sew a basting stitch all the way around the top of your skirt piece and pull the threads to gather it until the circumference of your skirt’s waist is the same as your waistband piece.
   
8. Position your skirt piece inside of the waistband so that the raw sides of the waistband and the gathered edge of the skirt are together, and the top of the waistband is facing down. Pin the waistband to the skirt.
   

   

   

9. Sew around the top of your skirt to attach the waistband to the skirt piece. Then flip the waistband right side up, remove the basting stitch (if it’s showing), and you’re done!
   

I can’t decide if it looks ridiculous or fabulous, so I’ll let you decide. The White Swan Skirt: Do or Don’t?

Share and Enjoy