New Grandma Wants to Sew!: Asymmetric skirts

For one of my Christmas dresses, I wanted to try an asymmetric skirt (shorter on one side than the other) with a full length underskirt. But before I made a mess of the expensive material I'd bought for this, I thought I'd try a toile - ideally a wearable one - I don't like to waste any fabric! This shows more or less what I was aiming for (below is the finally finished dress in the more expensive fabric).

In this post, I'll tell you how I went about designing the skirt by making my wearable toile. I've written another post about the dress pictured.

First, a word about asymmetric skirts (sometimes called 'Hi-lo' skirts). These are usually like circular skirts, but with the hem a different length at some point. In the past, the most common type was the skirt shorter at the front than at the back. Like this.

Not truly asymmetric, as it is symmetrical side to side, of course. But people have often used this description to mean a circular skirt with a hem of a different length in different places.This could be an evening dress, ground length at the back and knee length at the front, or short peplum / tunic length in the front and a little longer at the back, or anything in between. I converted a dress I didn't like as a dress, to a top with a hi-lo peplum this year.

More recently, there has also developed a fashion (especially for little girls' dresses) to turn the asymmetry through 90 degrees, so the short part is on one side and the longest part on the other, generally with an even length underskirt, (as in my first picture), or perhaps as a top to be worn with leggings. And this is more correctly asymmetric. Of course, with a skirt, as opposed to a dress, you can simply twist it round and wear it whichever way you want - even long at the front and short at the back if that's your thing.

I already knew how long the underskirt was going to have to be, as I was limited by the size of the tulle fabric, and that defined how long I needed the longer part of the overskirt to be. (There were two layers of this sparkly dotted tulle, and a lining layer, in gold, which showed a little below the tulle. This was because all my grand-daughters hate "scratchy" things against their skin, and this tulle was scratchy - so I made the lining layer a bit longer to hang below the tulle edges.)

I had a large enough piece left of some fabric I'd used previously for a child's layered dress to make a toile - a very thin cotton fabric, like lawn. I knew the basic principle of how to make an asymmetric skirt. Just imagine a circle skirt folded in half, and then move the central semi-circle (that forms the waist) towards one or other side. That forms your asymmetric skirt pattern, to be cut on the fold. In the right-hand diagram below, the shorter part to the left of the waist forms the shorter part of the skirt, be it at the front of the skirt or the side.

The challenge was to create one that was going to work for me.

I wasn't very confident that I could figure out the right radius for the asymmetric circle, because the radius was not going to be the same as the length of the long side of the skirt.

There are several patterns for asymmetric skirts, or 'Hi-lo' skirts, including this free one for a knit skirt from Boo Designs. However, I wanted to make my skirt not of knit fabric, but of woven. I had often seen cute pictures of an asymmetric dress PDF pattern from Simple Life - again, knit - called Ella, and was pleased to find they also do a woven version called Elouise. At the time of writing, both these patterns sell for $10.

I pieced the PDF pattern together, and figured out which lines were the asymmetrical skirt as opposed to the circular skirt. Once I'd done that, I realised that on the larger sizes, the short length side was actually much shorter than I intended. (While the long side gets much longer with the increase in sizes, the short side only increases its length by a small amount.) So I had to move the waist semicircle a few inches to the side, and redraw it.

I made a mistake on my first attempt. The long side was going to be too short and the other side too long. (I'll not bore you with this here, but if you want to know one way of rectifying a cutting mistake, I'll tell you at the end how I dealt with it.) After moving the semi-circle a bit towards the short side, I was able to cut a skirt that showed the underskirt at the side (as in the picture above), or at the front (as below) if treated as a hi (front) - lo (back) skirt. I didn't want an opening in the waist of my toile, as the Elouise pattern, so instead I enlarged the waistline a bit and made an elastic waistband.

Actually, this was still not exactly what I wanted for the dress I was planning, and I did move the semi-circle again to get the right proportions. However, it worked quite well for my wearable toile. I think it would still have worked with the shorter side (here the front) even shorter but I had no intention of remaking this for a third time.

Footnote: How I rectified a cutting mistake

I'm including this footnote in case it is useful!

On my first attempt, I started cutting the semicircle for the waist too far to one side. I didn't have enough fabric to start again. So I had to re-cut it further over, and this meant I had a gash in the other side. Like this.

The first thing I did was line the wrong side with some iron on interfacing, making sure the two sides of the gash matched as closely as possible.

I could have stopped there, it was pretty neat, but I was afraid that the interfacing might come unstuck, or the gash edges on the right side would start to fray, especially once the skirt went in the wash. So I made a patch, a little back 'yoke' for the skirt to cover the right side of the gash, which would be stitched right through and would hold the interfacing in place, and would be a 'design feature'. Here's my pattern design for the yoke, and the yoke piece cut out. You could do this with a contrasting fabric, perhaps plain black or jade, but as I had a little scrap of the fabric left, I carefully matched the pattern. I pressed a quarter inch hem under.