I’ve been seeing a lot of these horizontal-striped pencil skirts around.

I like the look of them, so naturally I’ve been keeping my eyes peeled for a suitable stripey garment to upcycle. Here we have a ginourmous men’s long-sleeve t-shirt, which set me back a whopping $3.99.

And I thought to myself, I like those stripes.

Arms & collar snipped off along the seamlines, leaving one side seam intact.

I wrapped the resulting piece around my dress form to get a skirt-sized tube, then trimmed off the excess & sewed up the side.

I trimmed along the top edge to get rid of the curve from the neckline, then played around with it until I figured out where the waist would be (using the original hem as my skirt hem).

Now, the material of this shirt was really  thin, so I decided to use the remaining bits of shirt, plus the sleeves, to make a lining for the skirt.  I had to do a little creative patching to get a piece long enough to make a skirt-sized tube.

So, the top edge was folded over at the waist point. Then the second tube got sewn to the edge of that fold-over. I ran a line of stitching all the way around to make an elastic casing (leaving a gap to get the elastic in of course!), then pressed all the seams. Just because it’s stretch fabric doesn’t mean you shouldn’t iron!

In went the elastic – I used an inch-wide one – and voila!

How long did it take me to make? Well, about 1.5 episodes of  Project Runway (Season 3). That Tim Gunn. He’s the star of the show!!

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