Girl’s Bandana Skirt Tutorial

Last Sunday, I mentioned my addiction to little girl’s skirts and my desire to sew a bagillion of them.  Well, I took some well deserved time for myself today and did something for someone else (of course).  With Bean being with Gammie, the hubby and I only had to juggle Baby Bird.  But only having one kid for a few hours doesn’t mean that I would have a ton of time.  So I decided to try my hand at the toddler bandana skirt tutorial I found online but try and make it work for my leggy 6.5 year old…

Girl’s Bandana Skirt Tutorial:

• you need 2 bandanas, 2 strips of fabric (6 in x 22 in), coordinating thread, 3/4 in elastic, safety-pin, and a sewing machine (unless you are some amazing and patient hand sewer)

1. Take a strip of fabric, fold in half, wrong sides together.  Iron.  Repeat for the second strip of fabric. 



2. Lay one of your bandana, right side up.  On the bottom of the bandana, lay a strip of fabric right side down (both sides of the strip are technically right sides but mine had a brocade print and one side print would be upside down if not sewn the correct way), matching the bottom of the bandana with the raw edges of your strip.  Repeat for the second bandana and fabric strip.
3. Sew the strip to the bandana.  Iron seems.  Repeat for second bandana/strip.
4. Place bandana/strip right sides together, matching up seams where you sewed the bandana and fabric strip together.  Sew up the side seams; you will now have a tube.
5. Since you used an entire bandana, you can now skip to step 6 if you do not want to alter the length of your skirt.  Trim off excess material from the top of the tube to desired length.  I trimmed about 5 inches off for my lanky 6.5 year old.
6. Create a casing for the elastic.  Fold over 1 inch and press.  Fold over another inch and press.  Sew as close as you can to the edge of the 1 inch fold stopping about 2 inches from your starting point.   Make sure you reinforce your start and stopping points to make sure they don’t unravel when you feed the elastic (I’ve made this rookie mistake in the past).
7. Attach the safety-pin to the elastic and feed it through the casing.  After it’s fed through the casing, I did a rough fitting on Bean to make sure it fit without cutting off her circulation.  Sew the elastic edges together.
8. Finish the casing hole, adjust the fabric around the elastic evenly, and you are done.  Hand it over to your model for pictures!

TIPS:  You can use the entire bandana length for a great shin length skirt.  If you do take a bit off the top, I quickly back stitched the side seam ends just to make sure it doesn’t unravel during the elastic step.  I then used the left over bandana length and fabric scraps to make a matching head band.  I’m saving it for Flower Friday though.

Yeah Me.  I get to sort of mark something off my “To Do” list.  Now, if only I knew the html code to make a slash through something.  I guess I’ll talk to my friend “Google” and see what she says.  Toodles.

Special thanks to V and Co. for the fabulous tutorial.

Toddler Bandana Skirt Tutorial