The solstice is behind us and shorts season well and truly upon us. Which means that its also time to go through my old jeans and see which are so torn that it’s time to turn them into cutoffs. This time around there were three pairs of pants ready to be patched and trimmed into shorts. But what to do with the now orphaned pant legs? What garment can I make that uses a very wide, but fairly short, single piece of fabric?
Of course!
I’m hardly the first person in the world to decide to make a denim kilt, but it was a fun weekend project and helped use up some scraps I wasn’t sure what else to do with. I’m pulling a fair amount of my method from this Instructable written by UglyMike.
Traditional kilt making is an art form practiced by professionals around the world, predominantly in Scotland. What I’m doing is not that, obviously. This is another adventure in scrapbusting, not an exploration into Scottish national dress nor sartorial history.
Step 0: Preparing the Denim
Before I even got started, I took all my former pant-legs and opened one seam on each. There was no point in opening both, of course, since I was about to sew them all together again. This created a long piece of denim, made of 12 distinct panels, that had been 6 pant legs from 3 pairs of pants. I tried to lay them out symmetrically around the center of the resulting rough rectangle, placing all the hemmed edges together.
Then I simply trimmed the top with a straightedge and rotary cutter to even it up. This length, given that these are pant legs that originally fit me, fits my waist-to-knee length quite well and one end is already hemmed.
Step 1: Kilt Measurements
A simple kilt is composed of three pieces, the over apron, the under apron, and the pleated part. The apron is the flat part in the front and is usually measures about 1/3 to 1/2 of the wearer’s waist in width. The pleated portion should end up being the rest of the waist measure, multiplied by 3 to account for the pleats. It starts as a simple rectangle measuring two aprons and the full pleated skirt:
Simple enough, so let’s have a look at my fabric. It turned out that it was actually too long, by about one whole pant leg. I ripped out the seam I’d just made connecting the last leg. In retrospect, I should have instead undone the two outermost original seams. That would have kept it more symmetric.
It’s fine.
Step 2: Kilt Pleating
At this point I started pleating. The first step is to measure in the apron width from each end and chalk mark that point. Fortunately, the width of one pant leg is about the same as my apron width. The pleats are about 2″ wide, so I marked out 4″ from the end of the apron. Then I folded the pleat mark to meet the apron mark and pinned it in place.
Every pleat after the first is done the same way, 4″ out from the where you can feel the fold of the previous pleat, which should be 2″ from the previous mark. I adjusted the lengths to use existing seams as pleats. This means that they’re irregular, anywhere from 1″ to 3″ wide, though mostly still pretty close to two.
Each pleat is pinned at the top and through the folds on either side to keep them in place. Once it was all put together, I ironed the pleats down working with high heat and steam. And if there’s one thing that denim is famous for, it’s holding nice clean creases, right?
Yeah, the creases barely lasted long enough for the next step which was, of course, stitching through all the folds to make them permanent. Once that was done, I topstitched down through the first few inches of each pleats and did a quick stitch along the top to keep the pleats and folds nice and clean.
And that’s a finished skirt. On to the next step.
Step 3: Scrapwork Waistband
A kilt is a wrap-around skirt, which means that my denim kilt needs to have a waistband to wrap around. This is where that extra pant leg and some of that line of excess denim that got cut off earlier will come back in. The leg itself wasn’t quite long enough to make the full waistband, but those scraps provided just enough extra to fill in the missing length.
Once again, I took advantage of the existing hems and placed the scraps in the center. Not only did this save me the effort of unpicking and redoing hems, it also makes the result look symmetric, since the scrapwork piece is centered at the back. Now I just needed to add the interfacing and I had a finished waistband ready to attach.
I folded and pressed where the original pant seams were already trying to fold back in, the difference in width between front and back causing some irregularity in the fold width in the patchwork piece. Still, this made attaching the waistband easy enough. One seam to connect it to the skirt and then a long line of topstiching all the way around.
I wasn’t anticipating the little belt-like pattern to the scraps, but I do like the result.
Step 4: Finishing My Denim Kilt
The last step is the closures. Now, I could go with the traditional leather strap and buckle closure, if I had any of those laying around. Many modern kits, especially utility kilts, use snaps as closures. Using snaps was my original plan but, as I discovered while putting them on, I only had two sets of snaps left.
Oops.
Oh well, that was enough to half finish, and now I just needed one more closure. Sure, I could buy more snaps, but this is meant to be using up my stash, not adding to it. Meaning that I need to look for another option.
That’s right, I did it. I broke down and used a button on the inside. Please forgive me. At least it’s not visible on the outside. I don’t know if that’s actually “wrong” but I haven’t seen any other kilts with buttons, and this sort of inside button waistband is more common on trousers.
And now, the end result, a scrapwork denim kilt!
