Blazers, Part IV

Hello, kiddies! I beat the sun home from work today and was able to take pics of the blazer-turned-skirt before it got dark. But let's start from the beginning, shall we? On Sunday, I showed you my jumping off point: a perfectly good, though slightly too large blazer. About halfway through my weight loss, I picked up this bad boy for about $10 at Tuesday Morning.

It's a decent quality wool blend in a beautiful pale pink and chocolate brown herringbone weave. And believe it or not, I'm going to turn it into a skirt.

I plan to reuse the peplum-ish pocket band, so I chopped that off first.

Then I carefully disassembled the jacket, saving the sleeves (left and right), the top portion of the back (top center - upside down), and the top portions of the front lapels (bottom center - upside down). This layout is approximately how the pieces will be re-assembled in skirt form.

I gave all my pieces a good press to get all those wrinkles out. And I removed the button from what was the left-hand front piece.

I evened up the edge of the upper back piece, where the shoulders and collar used to be.

Then I attached the upper back to the upper fronts with right sides together.

I folded the upper back upward and top-stitched along my new seam. The former lapels are going to be my back slit in my new skirt.

I trimmed off all the excess bits.

I also chopped off the sleeve caps for a straight edge.

Same layout as before, but now it's looking a little more like a potential skirt, isn't it?

Once the three pieces were joined into a tube, I tried it on inside out and pinned my side darts.

With the main skirt complete, I needed a lining. I didn't really want to piece together the lining from the blazer the same way I did the skirt itself, so I grabbed a ghost of refashions past from my scrap pile. You may recognize this as the underskirt from the paler pink bridesmaid dress that went into my Cinderella costume.

I removed the tulle layer and ironed out the wrinkles from the underskirt. I laid my tweed skirt-to-be on top and cut off the extra.

Then I realized the skirt fabric has a bit of stretch and the lining fabric does not. So I spliced in a couple more inches to be safe.

I stuck my inside-skirt into my right-side out lining and cut away a trapezoid where the slit is.

I pressed the bottom edge upward all around, and pressed the facing of the slit upward the other direction. Then I flipped each corner of the slit inside-out and sewed the outer and facing together (and promptly moved on to the next step without taking a photo).

With quite a bit of finagling, I attached the trapezoidal cut-out around the edges of the slit facing.

So it looked like this once flipped right-side-out again.

A lot more finagling had to happen to attach the bottom edge of the lining to the bottom edge of skirt, so much so that I couldn't really even get a decent photo of it.

But after sewing around the bottom edge, here it is all pretty and pressed.

Then came the zipper installation. I had this burgundy zipper in my stash - not quite the right color, but close enough considering it will be hidden under the peplum. So I sandwiched it between my tweed and my lining and sewed it to the seam allowances.

Then I top-stitched around the edges for a clean finish.

Now my skirt is functional. Let's make it pretty! I removed the pocket flaps from my blazer peplum by opening up that seam and then sewing it back together without the flaps.

The fabric just above the peplum will serve as my waistband, but the original darts made the fabric flare out a bit. So I picked out those seams and made them straight vertical.

To make the waistband/peplum fit, I needed to trim off about three inches from each end.

I flipped it inside out and re-sewed the ends.

Right-side-out again and you can barely even tell!

I cut away the excess lining fabric and pressed the edge over.

Then I folded over my new waistband and pressed again. I opened up the side seams a couple inches down. The center portion will be the waistband along the back side of my skirt, and the ends will be peplum flaps that fasten in the front. This way the peplum covers up the zipper without hindering the zipping and unzipping.

For the front portion of the waistband, I grabbed the collar from my old blazer. I trimmed off the bottom a bit and pressed the edges inward.

I pinned my front waistband and my peplum waistband to the skirt, inside-out.

Once that was sewn, I folded them over and sewed around again, making sure to sew "in the ditch" on the peplum, so the stitching wouldn't be too visible.

Last but not least, I hand-sewed on four hook-n-eyes, two per peplum flap.

I can go casual...

...or professional...

...but not too professional.

How's about a little closer look at that pepulm?

And the back slit...