Alter It August Part the Second

 

This week has been a rough one.  I ended up with a less-than-ideal camp schedule due to booking things too late (apparently, around here, February is too late for camps in August), so I had two kids on one end of the city and two kids on the other end all week.  I have basically been living in my car.  

 

In the brief moments of home time, I've tried to squeeze little projects in here and there (or editing a few lines here and there).  I decided to alter these ready-to-wear culottes I thrifted in June.  I bought them new with tags, and took them to visit my parents.  I wore them several times that week, and while I enjoyed them, they didn't quite feel like my style, as well as the fact that the rise was just a bit short.  (My rise is crazy long, so this isn't a great shock to me).  Fast forward to me washing them the first time and suddenly the rise was uncomfortably short.  Every time I put them on after that, I couldn't stand the fit, so I would immediately take them off.   (Sorry, I don't have any good photos of me wearing them as culottes.  Just take my word for it that they were awkward).

I had the idea to alter these into a skirt after seeing Helen's Winslow hack.  This is a hack to make on the front end of a sewing pattern, but I figured if I picked apart the center and inseams, I could make it work.  And I did!  The longest part (which wasn't that long, really) was unpicking the robust seams+serging/overlocking.  Once that was done, it was a simple matter of pinning the center seams together and cutting off the excess from the crotch curve.  I'm actually pretty pleased with the resulting skirt--it is cooler than the pants and more comfortable, plus it has pockets!  I think it will be a nice transitional piece in the fall too.

In other news, I finally watched Chernobyl, and you must run, not walk, to your nearest HBO provider and watch it.  The show is stunningly well done, morally complex, amazingly acted.  It draws a bit on Svetlana Alexievich's excellent book, Voices from Chernobyl (I highly recommend it), but many other sources as well.