Rock Chic(k)

Festival season is upon us! I love the summer with all its outdoor events. The highlight of my festival season is always Ireland's "Electric Picnic", a so-called "boutique music festival" that has grown to such size over the years that it is not so "boutique" anymore. This year will be the fourth time in a row that I am attending it - tent and sleeping bags in tow - revelling in music from the likes of Arcade Fire, Pulp, The Chemical Bros, Mogwai, Death in Vegas, Big Audio Dynamite and and and...

I am so much looking forward to it all, that I am already in the middle of preparing for it. Yesterday I sewed myself my "Ready to Rock-Rock" - (sorry, the pun is only funny for anyone who can speak German. "Rock" is the German word for "skirt").

Right, I admit, it's not new. It is old. It is made from an old pair of denims of mine that have been sitting at the bottom of my wardrobe for the past two years after a worn-through patch made them too embarrassing to wear. But they are just the right kind of worn, washed out denims to be worn at a festival where you might end up in a mud-bath, anyway.

So I took the scissors to my jeans and cut off the legs at knee-height. Instead of discarding the cut offs, I cut them open at the seams. Likewise, I cut the top half of the jeans open at the seams, carefully cutting out the seam nearly all the way up to the zip.

Then I placed a piece of denim from the off-cuts into the open triangle under the bit that is to become the skirt. The length will be adjusted later.

I held the pieces together with pins. And sewed the bits together with a double seam.

Here is the preliminary result before cutting the hem of the skirt properly.

And here it is all cut at the right length. I actually decided to leave it unhemmed and go for the rugged, raggy look with bits of cotton thread eventually hanging down.

If you want slightly more detailed instructions, you can also look at my tutorial for a similar skirt I sewed some time last year. 

So I am now kitted out for Electric Picnic 2011. A skirt ready to be discarded on site, if dirty necessary. Can't wait to put my dotty wellies on!

 

Ready to rock!

Best,