DIY Skirt from PJ Pants

On Sunday, when we were having my father-in-law's funeral/burial, the weather was pretty ugly: rainy, wet, chilly. I decided I wanted to wear these boots to keep my legs and feet warm and dry for stomping around at the cemetery.

I was originally wearing a basic knee-length black skirt, but when I put the boots on I thought, "These look like Scottish boots to me. I wish I had a tartan/plaid skirt to wear with them."

I had a turquoise skirt that was a little longer and maybe in a vague way resembled a kilt-like skirt with the two darts at the waist. I wore a dark brown, suede-type material long-sleeve shirt with it.
I guess it looked okay, no one told me I looked cute.
(When people tell me I look cute, they're really saying I look worse than usual, but they're too nice to actually say I look worse than usual, so they say I look cute. Trust me, I never look cute on my best day.)

Anyhoo. Couple days later, J brought in the bags of his Dad's clothes and personal items from the nursing home/hospital to go through and decide what to do with it all.
I was washing the clothes to be donated to a thrift store.

When lo and behold, what fell into my hands: (A pair of red plaid men's lounge pants)

I thought to myself, "I wonder if/I bet you can, make a skirt from pants," so I searched the internet to see if/how hard such a thing would be to do.

*Please note - this isn't a tutorial because I pretty much had no clue what I was doing. If you want to turn a pair of pants into a skirt, Search the 'net and find a site of someone who knows what they're doing.

I looked at some photos of it (I tried to read some How to's, but I'm not a sew'er so I don't understand a lot of the instructions and then I just get lost....) anyway I managed to get an idea of what I thought I might could try.

First, I cut the legs off.

Then I used my seam-ripper to rip open the legs seams. (Mostly. I don't really have the patience for that, so I just ripped some of the longer ones apart.)

I forgot to take a picture after this, but I turned the opened legs upside down, so the narrow'er ends were at the top.

They measured approx. 18" across, for a total of 36" around at the butt/top of the thighs.

I laid the legs together with wrong sides facing out and sewed the seams up to make the skirt part.

I turned the top part inside out and sewed new seams, taking a couple inches off each side, so the top part was (approx.) the same width, 18-inches across, as the legs/skirt part.

I turned both parts inside out and pinned the edges together, intending to sew them together that way, but when I turned it back right side out to check it, that didn't look right.

I ended up hemming the top part, then sewing it to the bottom/legs/skirt part.

I cut the bottom off the skirt straight(ish) and hemmed it,

And, to my amazement, I had made a skirt,

 

Here's the thing.
I love the bottom part of the skirt. It's swingy.

I would like you show you the top part, that should have gone around my butt/hips, but no.
Let's put it this way: after sewing, the butt/thighs part came out approx. 35" around, and turns out my big 'ol butt is more like 40".

Arrrrrgggghhhhh!!!