How To Sew: Adding A Skirt to a Shirt

I’m working on a series of posts about adjusting clothing to fit.  To see all of them click here – How to Sew.

My daughter has this long shirt/short skirt that she really likes.  She normally wears it with leggings, but recently we’ve noticed that the skirt doesn’t quite cover enough and the tulle is pulling away from the seam.  Since she really likes it, I’m going to lengthen the skirt a bit.

The first step is to remove the skirt from the shirt.  You can either cut them apart by cutting very close to the seam or use a seam ripper to rip out the seam.

Then, because the tulle was ripping out of the seam, I serged it back to the underskirt.

My daughter picked out this chevron print to be the skirt.  I cut a piece the same width as the current skirt and twice as long.

Then I sewed the ends together and hemmed the bottom (I used a rolled hem on my serger, but you can also fold the edge under 1/4″ and then turn it under 1/4″ again and stitch close to the fold).

Then, line up the top edges of the existing skirt and the new skirt and baste them together.  Don’t backstitch – you’ll be gathering this to make the skirt fit the shirt.

Pull the stitches up so that it fits the bottom of the t-shirt.

Pin the skirt to the shirt making sure you catch all the layers and make sure all the layers are flat…nothing is more frustrating than having part of the skirt sewn into the seam!  Then sew the seam.  If needed, pull out the basting stitches.  I only pull them out if they show.  😉

Then convince your daughter to try it on and admire your work.

Now it’s long enough that she could wear it without leggings!