Adventures in Sewing: Dress to Skirt with Shirred Waist

So, I happened upon a shirring/smocking tutorial while messing around on pinterest, and while browsing the blog, I happened upon a tutorial to turn a maxi-dress into a maxi skirt with a shirred waistband. It looked easy enough and I have a few dresses that have a cute print, but don't fit well up top. I was feeling particularly brave this morning and pulled out this dress

Pardon my un-made bed

I found this dress at a Ross back in high school and bought it one year for Easter. I have a lot of good memories in this dress (including wearing it to my high school and college graduations), and some sad feelings about the potential of ruining it, but the 15ish pounds I gained during college (a fair amount of which went into my chest) were having a hard time fitting into the bodice, and the skirt is just a smidge too short. I hoped that by taking the top off, I could keep this fun springy pattern and the adorable lace on the bottom for a few more years. First thing I did was remove the zipper with my seam ripper

I then used the seam ripper to take the bodice off. Just cutting it off would have been quite a bit quicker, but I wanted to keep as much of the length on the skirt as possible. I then pinned the opening from the zipper shut made a quick seam to close it off.

Now that I had a tube of fabric I pinned down the top at half an inch (like the tutorial said) and sewed it down to make a casing for elastic. This took a while because I haven't mastered sewing in a strait line yet. If you are new to sewing and trying this out, I would recommend a slightly larger casing. I will explain later.

I then shirred a waist band starting right below the casing. I'd show you a picture, but my camera spazzed out, and I couldn't get a clear one. The link with the tutorial has some pretty good pictures of this step. 

A quick note with shirring, after longer than I would like to admit of my sewing machine not cooperating with the elastic thread, I ran some google searches and found that only the bobbin should have elastic thread on it. Use regular thread for the top part of the stitch. I somehow missed that in the shirring tutorial.

The last step of the skirt is to thread 1/8 inch elastic through the casing and then stitch it shut. Remember that whole not mastered sewing in a strait line thing? I sewed the casing too narrow and was not able to thread the elastic through it. This could have been avoided if I had made the casing a little wider than 1/2 inch, which is what I will probably do next time. This is probably a sewing no-no of sorts, but I ended up zig zag stitching over the stretched out elastic on the inside of my skirt. The gathering effect on the outside is still the same, but the inside is not as pretty. Here are some pictures of the finished skirt. 

This is what the shirring looked like on the inside of the skirt

What the waistband looks like from the outside of the skirt

the skirt not tucked in 

 I know the shirt doesn't look so good tucked in, but I wanted to show you how the waistband looked on. Also, please ignore the messy bedroom in the background. 

Overall, I am happy about how my skirt turned out. Because I can wear the skirt down lower, I get a little bit more length at the bottom, and the shirred waistband is comfortable around my stomach at it's current size. The elastic has enough give that I will probably be able to continue wearing this skirt for a little while, but the skirt is too small to pull up over my hips, so I have to put it on over my head, and if my chest gets any bigger, I won't be able to get it on that way either. This would be preventable by making sure that the unshirred waist will fit over your hips before shirring it. I'm not sure how much shirring will take the waistband in (like if I started with a size medium dress if it would fit better or if it would be too big), but this is definitely something I would like to continue in the future