In my first post about easy skirts for girls, I wrote about gathered skirts. I think they are the simplest to make, use very little fabric, and don't need a pattern. But there are other types of skirt which are also pretty easy to make, and many of them can loosely come under a heading of circular and flared skirts. The main difference is that gathered skirts are usually made of a simple rectangle of fabric, so that there is as much fabric at the waistline as at the bottom hem. This can sometimes make them seem a bit bulky at the top. In contrast, a fully circular skirt will be a complete circle (often likened to a doughnut) so it has a wide hem and not too much fabric at the top. But you can also make skirts I'm calling 'flared' as a sort of catchall. They are some fraction of a circle, three-quarters, half, or even just a quarter. They will all have more fabric at the hem than at the waistine.
This is a gathered skirt:
This is a fully circular skirt:
And these two are flared skirts. I'll cover flared skirts in part three.
Many such skirts can also be made without an expensive pattern, if you are prepared to make a few measurements and draw a pattern for yourself. But you can also get patterns if that's what you prefer to work with.
This post will be on the classic circular skirt. They do take rather more fabric than simple gathered skirts, but, for smaller sizes, you can make them without a join from a metre or yard of fabric or less. And they look cute, especially on babies and little girls.
And for older girls - they are great for spinning!
Let's talk about the basic principle of making a circle skirt first. To make one without a seam - what I will call a fully circular skirt for now - requires you to cut a pattern on a double fold. First you fold the fabric one way - let's say, selvedge to selvedge. From this:
To this:
Then you fold it the other way, to make a sort of square. That will give you one point at which both the folds meet.
Next, you'll place your pattern template (about which more in a moment) with the waistline quadrant to that point. In this diagram, that is top right. In the photo below, it is top left.
To make this quarter circle template, you need three measurements:
1 & 2) the waist and hip measurements of the child
3) how long you want the skirt to be, plus a small amount for hem and seam allowance.
If you don't have a child on hand you can measure, check out my post on gathered skirts - there is a table with some average measurements for children of different ages.
Now you need a bit of maths. You need to be able to pull the waistline over the child's hips to get the skirt on and off. If making a knit skirt, you can use the waist measurement plus an inch or two. If you are making a woven skirt, I suggest using slightly more than the hip measurement, or the waist plus 2", whichever is larger. This will enable you to make a full circle from woven fabric without the need for an opening - but I'll come on to that possibility later. From the waist or hip measurement, you need to work out what the radius of the waistline circle will be. The radius is the measurement from the apex point to where the top of the skirt starts. It's half the diameter of the circle. And you get that measurement by dividing the waistline (whichever measurement you are using) by 2π. You remember π? It's 3.141593..... etc. So with a waistline measuring 25 inches, 25 divided by 2π gives you a radius of 4".
Maybe you don't want to do the maths? Here you go, I've done it for you.
It makes a big difference if you are using a knit fabric versus a woven fabric. If you use a knit fabric for a circle skirt, the waistline hole (i.e. the centre of the doughnut) may need not be much bigger in circumference than the child's actual waist, because the fabric does have some stretch. However, if you use a woven fabric, there won't be much give at all. That's why I suggest using the hip measurement, or the waist measurement plus 2". It will then gather very slightly into the waistband,
This is what I do most of the time. Once it is stretched around that little round tummy, you don't notice the gathering much. (Sorry this is slightly blurry, she was still a bit tottery on her feet at this stage.)
In fact, even with a knit fabric I do tend to allow at least 1 inch extra on the waist measurement, and hence a slightly larger radius. - but it depends on just how much stretch there is in the fabric.
The other alternative with a woven fabric is to have a small split down from the waist at one side, or at the back, to enable it to open wider. I'll come on to that shortly.
You then need to draw a second arc below the waistline one, the length you want the skirt, plus seam allowance and hem. In this picture, there are raw edges on the right and at the bottom. You have to see the point at top left as the apex of your quarter circle. The skirt length is measured from the first arc, top left.
(You may find it easier to add the radius of the waistline arc to the skirt length, and measure from the apex. I always measure from the waistline, using a tape measure or long ruler to mark several points, which I then join up by hand.)
Using this quarter template on the twice folded fabric, once it is cut out and unfolded again, it will be a full circle.
Now here's a key point: a fully circular skirt with no seams is best made with a non-directional fabric. What do I mean by that? A plain fabric is non-directional, and many with spots also, whereas a stripe does have direction. So with a plain fabric, or one with spots, the front, back and sides of the skirt will look much the same. With stripe, you may have the stripes horizontal at the back and front, but they will be vertical on the sides. You may not mind that. For some patterns though, I'd prefer not to make a completely circular skirt, because if the pattern is the right way up on the front, the pattern will be sideways on the sides, and upside down on the back. So with this fabric, for example, if you had them the right way up on the front, you'd have all the little unicorns on the back upside down. (And they'd be on their sides at the sides of the skirt.)
Some patterns can be treated as a non-directional fabric, where there are flowers, animals etc, pointing in lots of different directions. I would happily use this fabric below for a circular skirt. Pretty well all the circle skirts I've shown above fall into that category. There may actually be a right way up, but it doesn't matter too much.
Whereas I chose not to make this fabric as a fully circular skirt, but made a flared skirt with side seams so the rabbits all stayed the right way up!
You can't see the rabbits on the back but I assure you they are all the right way up!
On the circular skirt below, you can see the the pattern does have a direction - but it's not a direction that really matters. With this more abstract design, who is to say which is the right way up? So I just went ahead and made a fully circular skirt.
What can you do if you have a directional pattern and you want to avoid upside down bunny rabbits or unicorns, but you'd still like to make a circular skirt? Having told you that fully circular skirts without a seam are made by folding the fabric twice, to create a doughnut, I can now tell you that it is perfectly possible to create a circular skirt with seams. The main thing you will have to bear in mind is that you will need to add some seam allowance to your template, or you will end up with too small a waist measurement.
The simplest way is to make two semi-circles, and join these at the side seams.
You'll still have some rabbits at the sides sideways on, but at least you can avoid having them upside down, as long as you keep the pattern the same way up for both pieces. You can also use four quarters, in this case making sure that the centre of the template goes down the same direction to ensure each one has the pattern the right way up. You'll then want to have the seams not at the sides, because that would mean a seam down the centre front. It is better then to have the middle of one of the four panels as the centre front, not a seam.
Having cut out your circle, we need to make it the circle into a skirt. If you've cut out a complete circle, with no split or seams, you're ready to move on to my post on making up skirts and finishing skirts.
However, for a number of reasons, you may not yet have a complete circle. You may have cut in 2 or 4 panels to keep the pattern the right way up; you may have done this because your fabric wasn't wide enough to get a complete circle; or you may be using a woven fabric, where you have cut the waist line a bit too exact for there to be enough give to get it over the hips.
Let's start with the panels. You added some seam allowance, right? (If not, see below.) Assuming you did add seam allowance, now you need to join your panels to make a complete circle. On all the circular skirts above, bar one, I was making small enough sizes that I could do a complete circle, with no seams. The exception was this one. I was making this skirt, for a child, from an existing circular skirt for an adult. There was plenty of fabric, but I knew I was going to have to make panels and join them. I managed it with two semi-circular panels. So I had added half an inch to the top as you look at it here. (The left side has the two folded edges put together - no need for extra there.)
So once both pieces were cut out, I joined them using that half inch seam allowance. (It doesn't really matter what seam allowance you use as long as you sew it using the same allowance you added when cutting out, to keep the waistline measurement as you wanted.)
As it happened, I eventually turned this into a skirt with a bodice, i.e. a dress! However, I did toy with making it into a skirt, as pictured below, but she decided she'd prefer it as a dress.
You've now got a nice circle or doughnut. The waistline is big enough to go over the hips, if it's a knit fabric, or you'd allowed enough, by making the radius slightly bigger. If so, you're ready to go to my post on making up skirts and finishing skirts.
But you may have a waisthole that is too tight as it is to be able to get the skirt over the hips. So you'll need to make a slit or opening. With a child's skirt, often a 3 inch slit will be enough. For an adult, you may need a 5-6" slit. For an older child, somewhere in between. If your skirt has side seams, you may be able to open up one of the side seams, and add a facing or bias binding to finish it nicely (or a small zip). If not, then you need to make a placket. There are a couple of good videos showing you how to do this, this one from Violette Field Threads, and this one from Little Lizard King. If you don't get on with using You Tube videos for instruction, there is another tutorial from Bella Sunshine Designs. I don't have any of my own pictures to show you, because I have always gone the route of having a bit of extra measurement in the waistline. This means I can go straight on to adding a waistband. You'll find more about that in my post on making up skirts and finishing skirts.
For more information on circular skirt making, I can recommend all of these posts.
Dana of Made Every Day
And more from New Grandma Wants to Sew, on skirts:
My post on making gathered skirts
My post on making flared or part circular skirts
My post on making up and finished skirts.
No comments:
Post a Comment