My DIY tapered skirt

Here's a little DIY to help you get more teal in your life this fall. Tapering a skirt is a fairly easy refashion, and tapering can modernize and tailor an otherwise blah skirt.

 

Get a load of this outfit below from J. Crew. Pale blue sweater, teal green Telegraph pencil skirt and the awesome surprise element - leopard pumps. See what $800 and a team of stylists can pull off?

 

 

Inspired, I went looking for a less expensive version of the skirt. Fortunately for all of us, teal was a big color about 20 years ago. This means thrift stores have teal.

 

This particular skirt seen below came with a big awful jacket that I ditched faster than you can say "1980s." The skirt had a great color and nice fabric but still felt frumpy dumpy.  I thought a taper would help.



To taper a skirt, first try it on and then note where the skirt would naturally continue straight or slightly in instead of out. Mark the top of this imaginary line with a pin. Mark your hem with a pin at approximately how far you want the skirt to taper in.

Take the skirt off, turn it inside out and lift up the lining. Use a tape measure to make sure that both sides of the skirt are tapering in the same amount. Also make sure the taper starts at the same spot on the side seam. You want the length of the taper and the angle to be the same on both sides.

Sketch a taper line. Pin along the line (not shown) and try the skirt on. Move around in the skirt to make sure you can sit, walk and so forth.  Then turn the pins perpendicular to the line as show above. Now your taper is ready to sew.

Note: To do this properly, you really should rip out the hem and drop the hem and then sew the taper seam. And then resew the hem. However, if your taper is not too drastic and if you are lazy like me, you can get away with not dropping and resewing the hem. Just sew a straight seam, following the line shown above. Do the same for the other side of the skirt.

See, the seam doesn't look too bad for cheating.

Skirt looks better. Unfortunately gut pleats have not come back like the color teal. You can get around this by losing weight or untucking.

Cardigan:Target. Pumps: thrifted. Bracelet: Mom. Total cost $20. Self styled, thus a little wrinkly.

Would you try tapering a skirt?