Festival skirt with applique silver stars

I am really getting into this upcycling lark. I made this before I had my operation. I am thinking it will be a fun Christmas skirt.

This is based on the Zoe Karssen star skirt. You can see the real thing currently on UK Ebay here for £39. That one though is leather. It works perfectly in upcycled pleather though. The original skirt is in my opinion flawed as well since it only has stars on the front. If you make one of these thats your choice. I put them on both sides.

The original is leather but no reason not to use faux leather and its much easier to sew than the real thing. Also there are plenty of very cheap ( as in 99p + postage) skirts on Ebay for this kind of project. You could have any colour combination here as well. I went with what I had available which is pretty similar to the original but this could work in any colour-way really. In fact my stars are metallic and glittery like tinsel.
I think on the original skirt they are just plain pink so argueable mine is better😀 Also you could do this with a different shape - eg flowers or hearts. I may have a go at that later. It feels more a Spring project.

I had a silver skirt from a previous Christmas so decided I could use this and update it by using the offcuts from my Flame Applique Skirt. I bought the materials for the Flame skirt very cheap from Ebay.

Originally I was aiming to make the Flame skirt as just copy the RTW versions ( so black, gold and silver) but I ended up doing a totally different colour way of that skirt because I got hold of a metallic red fabric which was really nice and it inspired me to do my own thing instead and I had some of the red metallic fabric left over from the Flame skirt so I used a cookie cutter to draw round to make stars. They are not very perfect stars but then it is hand made:)

 There were a few scratches in the silver coating on my old skirt so the stars cover these pretty well.

 I think perhaps this may have been better if I had put the stars on more regularly spaced but at the time I did not really want them like that so I did them random.

I am still not sure about this but there is no going back with leather or faux leather types of fabric cos it makes holes when you sew it so if they get moved it will show and look amateurish so best left alone now its done. I added a dab of fabric glue under each star to hold it down long enough to be able to sew it, then, as previously with my Flame skirt, I used a walking foot to sew these and went very slowly because I had to turn at each star point.

To sew on the stars I also had to ripstitch around the bottom of this skirt because it was lined with the lining attached to the bottom to give an invisible hem. If I had not detached it I would have had to sew through it which besides looking unprofessional might have made the lining twist and be uncomfortable.
It was very easy to use a stich ripper to detach it.  Instead of re-attaching which would have meant hand stitching - even if I managed to do that it could have looked really rubbish - so I glued the hem back up and seperately sewed a new hem to the lining fabric. This was a lot easier that trying to re-attach to the (p)leather which may have then ripped because it can only be sewn so many times.

 I very much like this. Its a great new skirt for Christmas this year and I reckon I will aim to wear it lots because its not really very wearable the rest of the year.

Or maybe for festivals?

Could be a bit much for summer tho so it could be a very short term useage, but for the price of some scraps from a previous project, which was also made using very cheap second hand Ebay skirts, its a great way to update something.

I think it would also be quite easy to do this to an old black pleather skirt with any colour you find in a charity shop or your wardrobe and since so little fabric is needed for the stars you might even squeeze enough out of an old handbag.

I already owned the silver skirt but have had a quick look on Ebay and found a similar Zara basic silver skirt in pleather for £1.10 and with postage this cost under £5 and the red skirt the stars came from was £3.90 including postage and bearing in mind this was previously also used to make another skirt, its a very cheap upcycle really.  And I really enjoyed making this.

I certainly could not buy the fabric for less anyway. And since I already used the red skirt fabric for the red flames on my Flame skirt, I kind of think of this one as a freebie. 

See you next week,

Bracken