Refashioning: Shorts to Skirts

The weather has taken a sudden turn toward summer here, so I recently dragged out all the pairs of shorts I own and tried them on. As I suspected, only two pairs still fit me. Of the three that didn’t I wasn’t too disappointed about discarding two, but I was a bit sad about this pair:

Nearly all my shorts are menswear, and these are no exception. I have a long body and high waistline, so low waisted pants either don’t fit me or are unbearably uncomfortable. Even what they call ‘high waisted’ these days is a bit low on me. For the last ten to fifteen years I’ve bought only one or two pairs of women’s pants, and I am so looking forward to waistline fashions to swing the other way again. In the meantime, I discovered a while back that the baggier styles of men’s pants and shorts can be comfortable. These shorts actually looked good, too. Funny how when things fit they look good on you. But I’ve put on weight since I bought them and they weren’t looking good or feeling comfortable any more.

So I got chopping:

The waistband came off. The inner leg seams were unpicked so I could sew fronts to fronts and backs to backs. I also took some fabric off the bottom of both legs to make into a new waistband.

I haz new skirt:

In fact, a few days later I had another look at the pair of shorts I was going to cut up intro strips for rag rugs, and decided to cut the inner leg seam to see if they’d fit better as a skirt. Sure enough, there was plenty of room once the waistband could sit at my natural waist line. So I got sewing – and this time I didn’t have to redo the waistband so it was a lot faster:

New denim skirt!

In the end I didn’t have to toss any of the pairs of shorts. The third too-small pair, made of cheap lightweight cotton, were fixed by cutting off the waistband and adding a band of stretchy ribbing. In this case they remained as shorts – and very comfortable they are, too!