Festival Hot Pants!

Hi everyone, Camille here from www.instagram.com/chipie.couture/ on instagram and I am here today to show you how to make a super cool pair of skirted shorts. Some of you might have seen me in facebook sewing groups, some not, so I will briefly introduce myself before jumping in with this awesome hack. I recently turned 23, I live in Québec, the french speaking portion of Canada, I am studying to become a primary school teacher and i have been sewing for just a little shy of 6 years. Since my very first test for George and Ginger, I fell in love with Kristi’s way of doing things and I am absolutely honored to take part in such a beautiful adventure of guest blogging for this amazing company and creator. Now that you know a little more about me, let’s get to the hacking and mashing!

Little disclaimer:  this is my very first time writing a sewing blog post and I am french speaking, so bear with me please, I will do my best.

To do this awesome mash, you will need:

• the festival freebies pattern for the festival skirt
• the heat wave hot pants for the short pattern
• a sewing machine and/or serger
• any other sewing accessory you normally use

First off, you need to print both patterns and assemble the pieces as you would normally do. If you need any adjustments, don’t forget to do them before it is too late ( like I seem to do more often than not!) Here, you can see my Heat wave adjusted pattern pieces. Side note on this, I am making the pocketless version of the shorts, but this mash can work with pockets, no problem. 

For the festival skirt construction, you can use the back skirt panel for a fuller skirt or go without, like me here, for a little less dramatic skirt. I suggest doing just both front panels if using knit for the skirt, as knits are usually heavier.

Here are the pattern pieces you will need for this hack/mash

from the Heat wave shorts :

    the front short, the back short, the waistband, the pocket pieces (optional)

from the festival skirt:

    the front skirt piece, the back skirt piece (optional)

Now is the time to choose the fabric to use. The recommended fabric for the heat wave is stable knit with 2-way stretch, but any fabric with at least 50% stretch is good. The festival skirt calls for flowy woven fabric with a nice drape. You can choose to use different fabric or knit for both portions if you want the same fabric all over. I used french terry for the shorts, coton lycra for the waistband et voile for the skirt portion and everything came together well, even with my mix of fibers.

After cutting out every piece of fabric needed, the first step is to construct the Heat wave shorts up until adding the waistband, which will be done later. You should now have a waistband-less short like this:

Next, you need to sew up the skirt portion from the festival skirt pattern and don’t forget to hem before the next step. You can do with or without the back piece, depending on the gathering you want happening. Now, instead of gathering so the skirt is the same length as the waistband, you gather so that each end of the skirt gathers is over the shorts darts, so the front is uncovered,but the back and sides are. Now this is following preference, you can do a wider skirt-less opening, or narrower. I decided to make the sides of the skirt end at the front darts of the shorts, but the distance is up to you.This is what it looks like:

You need to pin, or baste if you prefer, all of this in place so that you can attach the waistband next. First you assemble the waistband, per the Heat wave instructions, and then you can attach it to the now skirted short, marking the quarters to help even everything out before sewing the waistband to the main piece. On this step, don’t be afraid of pins or clips, they are your friends.

Congrats, you are now finished and can go show off your new creation or take a few pictures and share them on the G+G facebook group www.facebook.com/groups/1486285618343038/ or on instagram tagging G+G and using the hashtag #ggfestivalhotpants .