LDS Temple skirt and cardigan idea...

If you are LDS and would love to have a new temple dress/skirt for under $20 then keep reading. If your not LDS and are wondering what the heck a temple dress is then keep reading too :). In our religion we attend Temples to worship God and to fulfill his sacred work. We have an all white dress code once we are inside. So this can also be used as a way to vamp up a cardigan. The dress I usually wear is seriously two sizes too big. The chest is probably four times too big, ha, so I really wanted something new, comfy, and affordable. I first purchased a yard and a half of this white fabric from JoAnns which was on sale for $5 a yd. Then you can take a skirt you already have and lay in on top of your material which should be folded in half in the right direction. From there you can cut around the skirt leaving 1 inch on each side for the seam. I just held mine up to my body and left about 3 inches extra on each side of my hips and then cut a slant downward towards the bottoms of the material. But the slant is very slight as seen in the above picture. Next, pin your fabric wrong sides together and sew the sides together.
I usually like to use my surger to bind the edges together but didn't feel like changing out my black thread to white. So if you don't have a surger use pinking scissors to leave a crinkled cut edge which stops the material from fraying. (I had to google for 20 minutes to find out that those scissors are called "pinking" scissors-sheesh!)

I then took my dress slip that I used for my other dress and cut off the top of it leaving the overall length of it a little shorter than my skirts length. If you don't have a slip then you can use a white liner and do the exact same thing to it as you just did above. Next turn your slip or finished liner inside out and put it over your skirt material that is inside out. Line the tops together, pin, and sew the top edges together. After that, I turned the skirt inside out and turned over about 1 inch and sewed it around the entire top of the skirt leaving a 2 inch opening to insert the elastic. Then you take a safety pin and pin it to one of the ends of your elastic. Next push it through and opening and use the safety pin which is inside your skirt now and push and keep stretching the now gathered edge until you meet up to the two inch opening again. Cut your elastic to your desired waist length and then sew the edges together. Then close up your two inch opening.
Next, try on your skirt and place a pin on the bottom where you want your hem line of your skirt to be. Then when you take it off you can pin the rest. I was lazy and just used the pinking scissors to cut the bottom edge so I wouldn't have to fold it over twice before sewing the bottom hem line. Your skirt should now be complete. If this is confusing for some of you, at your request, I'll do a more extensive tutorial :).

Next, I used the scraps and made these fabric roses and then hand sewed them onto the cardigan. I got this cardigan at Walmart for under $13. I also added a couple to my white slippers that I have. The tutorial for these roses will be posted next week.

And here is the finished project.