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Welcome to my Blog

I am a grandmother to 4 little girls. I blog about the things I make for them, review patterns, provide tutorials on how I've dealt with techniques or problems, which I hope may help others, and give links to the (mostly) free patterns I use. Every so often, I do a 'Best of..' post listing the best free patterns I've found under specific headings - babies, girls, boys etc. Enjoy the Blog!

Monday 26 October 2020

Easy Skirts - Part 3 Flared and part circular skirts

 I've already told you about two other types of skirts that are pretty easy to make, without a pattern, i.e. gathered skirts, and circular skirts. This is a fully circular skirt. 


This is a type of flared skirt - it is a smaller fraction of a circle, rather than a complete circle.


There are several reasons why you might opt for a part circle. So in this post, I'll explore those, and show you an easy way to make them.

 Flared and part circular skirts

Skirts which are not full circles, can be three quarters, half, or even quarter of a circle, or in fact any other fraction in between. To make these, you'd need to do a slightly different calculation of radius. I've given you some links at the bottom of this post if you'd like to get more on the maths. I've also summarised the maths down at the bottom if you'd like to use it to help you draft a pattern. On the other hand, if you do an internet search, you will pretty quickly find an automatic radius calculator in which you enter the waist measurement and it will give you your radius measurement. BUT - don't switch off, I'm going to show you an easier way than calculating with lots of maths.

The advantage  of part circular skirts is that they will generally require less fabric than a fully circular skirt. You will always have at least one join (which would be centre back, and which would still need a lot of fabric width) or more likely, two or more. When you have two or more seams, it's easy to make sure your pattern is the right way up both on the front and back of the skirt. And with two sides seams, you can add pockets.

Let's just talk about cutting out. You'll remember that for a fully circular skirt, you will fold the fabric twice, if possible, and cut out one quarter of the circle. For a semi circular skirt, you can fold the fabric once, and again cut one quarter. That will give you a centre back seam. Or you can cut out two separate quarters, adding in seam alllowance, and have two seams at the sides. 

This is a semi-circular skirt. You can see that it is not quite as wide as the orange fully circular one at the top, but it is still quite full and twirly.

With a quarter circle, you will cut one quarter on unfolded fabric. I don't make a lot of these - in fact, I don't think I ever have, In my view they'd be more suitable for an adult, as they give a very A-line profile.

Which leave us with the perhaps less usual 3/4 circle skirt. There are two main ways: one, you can cut like a circle skirt on a double fold, and then just remove one quarter. This seems like a waste of fabric - you might just as well make the full circle. The more sensible way is to split the three-quarter pattern in two, adding seam allowance, so you actually have 2 3/8 circles. Then you can be more economical with the fabric. This will give you two side seams, again enabling you to insert side pockets if you want.

And here's one of my favourite 3/4 circle skirts.

In fact, for this one, I was seriously short of fabric, but I'll show you how I made it work. In fact, I first split the pattern into 4 pieces, not two. And even then I had to sheer off a little more. You can see I've folded the pattern edges leaving the top untouched - I didn't want to make the waist smaller. So I veered it from nothing at the top to an inch or so at the bottom.

Next, I was fortunate in that my fabric was non-directional, in the sense that the little bears were scattered over it in all directions. So I was able to reverse the direction of the pattern to use the fabric as economically as possible. These are the cut-out pattern pieces, but I've laid them out as they were cut, and the pink dotted lines show you where the edges of the fabric were - it was a long thin strip of fabirc that I had.

And when all the pieces were put together (and a little waistband added) it looked like this. Not perfect, but you didn't notice that in the earlier picture, did you?

Now, I promised you an easier way than doing lots of maths. (This series of posts is all about easy ways to make skirts, right?) I learnt another way to create a template for a flared skirt which is now my go to for girls' skirts, and so I'll share it with you now. I'd like to be able to give credit to the designer I learned this trick from, but I'm not going to attempt to give you the link, because the last time I tried to look at it, I got a message that the web site was corrupted and dangerous, sadly. It originally came from This Mama Makes Stuff, so all credit to her. You may still find links via Pinterest  - I strongly suggest you don't click on them. She called it the Twrrly Whirly Skirt.

It's not strictly a 'fraction of a circle' skirt, but somewhere between that and a gathered skirt.

Here's the trick. Start once more with your waist measurement x 0.75 (approximately - that isn't set in stone), and skirt length. And draw a rectangle on some paper using those measurements, adding a bit of seam allowance at the top and and enough for your hem at the bottom. The reasoning for the 0.75 multiplier is this. If you multiply by 1.5, you'll be back in the gathered skirt territory. But you are going to cut on the fold, so you can halve it, hence 1.5 / 2 = 3/4, or 0.75. But you could use a slightly smaller multiplier, which will make it less gathered.

Next, mark some lines from the bottom hem to just below the top (waistline). I usually mark them at about every two to three inches, depending on the size, so you might have somewhere between 5 and 8 sections. And cut along these lines, being careful NOT to cut right through to the top. (If you do, just stick it back together with a bit of cellotape.)

Then, put this on another sheet of paper, and start gently spreading the sections about 2-3" apart at the bottom, sitcking them in place as you go. You can then join the top (waistline) and bottom (hem) in a nice curve, and there's your pattern. One side goes on the fold of your fabric.


I've used this method so many times now. 





Here's another where I was so short of fabric (just a couple of fat quarters and another small scrap) that I had to make it all in panels, adding in the stripes between to get enough width - but my granddaughter loved the end result.


And another way to cope with too little fabric - I added a frill to the bottom of this one.




So, that's the easy way. And if you'd now like to find out more about completing an easy skirt, whether gathered, circular, or flared, do look at this post on just that subject. 

However, if you really want to know more about the maths to help you produce a pattern for skirts that are a fraction of a circle, or even more than one circle, read on.

For calculating the radius to form the waist, for a full circle skirt, you would need to divide the waist measurement (WM) by 2π. π is 3.14 (approx) so 2π is 6.28. So this is how you work out what the radius of the waistline should be. Note that you can also make skirts which are larger than 1 full circle, for example twice or even 3 times, for a very full skirt, so in the interests of completeness I've shown you how it works for a double circle skirt. And I've also attempted to summarise the best ways to lay out and cut your pattern. As I've shown above, there are alternatives in some cases, depending on the width of your fabric. Also note that I've made no allowance here for seam allowances or ease - this table just shows the basic calculations.


I have no intention of telling you in detail here how to make these skirts  - this post is for easy skirts, and I've given you my preferred method. For a fully circular skirt, you can read my post on those. But I'll give you some links, if you want to find out more about the art and design of part circle or multiple circle skirts. 









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