pants to skirt adventure

my daughter grew too tall for these pants but they were still in very good condition. not to mention a pretty color. i started off by cutting them the skirt length that i desired (around knee) and then i split the inside leg seams. the front seam was split to the zipper and the back seam to about the bottom edge of the pockets. before starting this project i looked at many other web sites that had done the same thing. some of them split the outside leg seams as well but i thought that was over kill. make sure to split the seams very carefully avoiding ripping or pulling at the material. if you do it carefully the material will fold under on it's own making the edges much easier to sew. next, i let greenleaf dig into my stash of remnants and find a scrap that she and i could both live with. you could use the cut off legs to fill the gaps but we wanted to "pretty it up". i cut two inserts a size bigger than the triangles that i needed. the front insert i just pinned in place, making sure the pant hem was turned under. the back insert i pin tucked first and then played with to get it to lay just right before pinning it into place. i did this to give the back a sort of "princessy" feel. after pinning, i sewed the inserts into place being careful to use a long stitch, just in case i had to rip it out again. once everything is sewn to your satisfaction you can go back over it with a shorter or fancier stitch. with the inserts sewn in, all that was left was to hem. i pinned up the hem with greenleaf wearing the skirt. it looked even on her but when she took it off i saw that the back was longer than the front. i decided to take out some of the skirts from her closet and see what they looked like. i found that, when holding them up with the waist even, half of them were longer in the back and the rest were the same all the way around. after considering, i decided that i like it longer in the back. it makes sense. after all, the human butt sticks out a bit making the skirt rise up in the back AND having a little extra cloth in the back for when you sit down never hurt anyone. i hemmed once with a straight stitch and then went back
around with a fancy stitch a little higher up. that's all there is to it. it's really very simple and now that i know that, i'll be doing it a lot more.