Refashion: Oversized Yoga Pants to Maxi Skirt

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For my next project, I decided to say goodbye to my favorite Chinese buffet pants. Sure, they called them yoga pants at Target, but I never used this pair for yoga! Instead, these were always part of my game day outfit--that is, for me and my former roomie, going to a Chinese buffet was a sport.  Of course, you don't want to wear skinny jeans when you're planning on stuffing your face with Peking duck and steamed buns!

Anyway, because I have since been converted into this low sodium, low fat diet, the pants are now too big for me. I thought it would be perfect for my refashion experiments.  So it is now a maxi skirt.

To start, cut the inside seams as shown below:

Turn pants wrong side out.  Then match the outside seams and pin at the bottom to keep from sliding around:

Next pin the cut seams together so you can mark where you're going to sew and cut:

I like to sew and then cut to make sure the garment fits right before I permanently chop off parts of it.  For the front part of the skirt, just sew straight from the top to the bottom.  For the back, start sewing straight from the section of the skirt that will rest on the fullest part of your butt to the bottom of the skirt. Don't worry if your seams don't match at the bottom. You can re-hem the skirt as the last step.  In my case, my pants were so old that the hem was all crooked when I closed the seams so I did have to re-hem the skirt.

As an aside, you will notice that I pin perpendicular to the seams.  This is a tip I got from my sewing bible: the Singer Complete Photo Guide to Sewing.  This makes it easier to remove the pins as you sew and I find actually stabilizes the fabric more than pinning parallel to the seam.

Next, cut the excess fabric off the seams.

Finally, trim the bottom to make a straight hem and sew.  My pants were really long on me so even if I had to cut the original hem, I was still left with a long enough skirt:

And here's the finished product... forgive the cloudy photo as I need to dust my mirror!

This project only took about an hour, considering I had to figure out how to re-shape the pants into a skirt. It might have been quicker if I had a tutorial!