Today I’m going to risk the wrath of the paper gods by patterning 12 different variations of
a basic flared skirt, all at once. Here, have a chart. The x axis variations will determine
how full the skirt is at the waist. You can make this curve to fit your waist exactly,
which will result in a smooth, fitted skirt. Or you can make it larger than your waist,
and use gathers or pleats to reduce it. This will result in a much fuller skirt. For example,
both this orange skirt and this plaid dress are technically half-circle skirts. But the plaid
skirt has a larger waist that was pleated down, giving it a nice design detail in the pleats,
but also making it much fuller at the hem. To simplify things, I’ll make the curve on a
fitted skirt match my waist measurement exactly, or 100%. For gathered skirts, you don’t want them
too terribly full, or they’ll get bulky. I think I’ll make the gathered waist curve twice as large,
or 200% of the finished waist measurement. And for pleated skirts, you can get away with a lot
more fullness, because the pleats keep it toned down up top. For pleated skirts, I’ll triple
the waits measurement, bringing it up to 300%. Of course, these aren’t hard and fast rules—I
literally just made them up—and you can do it however you want.
You could make a lightly gathered skirt with 150% of your waist measurement. You could make
it 400%. You could pleat a 200% measurement, and gather a 300% measurement. Everything will depend
on what you want, what you find flattering, and what your design requires. But these
are the baselines I’ll be going to go with. Now for the y axis variations, these are what
percentage of a circle your pattern will use. The waist measurement determines how full the
skirt will be at the waist, and the percentage of the circle determines how wide the skirt will be
at the hem. I’m going to pattern 4 different variations. I will make full circle skirts,
half-circle skirts, quarter-circle skirts, which are also called a-line skirts,
and I’ll make a 3/4 circle skirt, because sometimes you want a nice in-between option.
To start, you only need two measurements, the waist and the length you want the skirt
to be. My waist fluctuates between 27-28”, and after experimenting with making skirts anywhere
from 26” to 30” at the waist, I’ve found that my orange skirt, with a waist measurement of 28.5”,
is my most comfortable skirt. For the length, I’m going to cut each pattern to 29” long. Allowing
for seams and hems, this will give the skirts a finished length of 27”. I prefer nice wide hems,
but if you are making a circle skirt, or any kind of flared skirt, keep in mind that
a narrow hem will stitch best, with the least amount of puckering and tucking and twisting,
so I would recommend allowing no wider than an inch for the hem.
For our first pattern, let’s start with the simplest, which is a full circle skirt with
a fitted waist. Now I am only going to be patterning a quarter of the skirt.
So, for my fitted skirt, this inner circle circumference needs to equal 28.5”, which
means for a quarter of the skirt, it needs to equal 1/4th of that, 7.125, or 7 and 1/8th inch.
Actually, here’s a conversion chart for fractions of an inch and decimals. I learned all these
by heart when I worked at fabric shops, but you might just want to screenshot it or copy it down.
I’m going to go ahead and write that down at the top of the Fitted column. Every fitted skirt
pattern, no matter how wide the hem, will need to have a 7.125” measurement at this inner curve.
Using this, we can go ahead and mark the other two columns. The Gathered skirts,
with a 200% waist measurement, will need double that, or a 14.25” curve. The pleated skirts,
with a 300% waist measurement, will need a 21.375” curve. Got it so far? Good.
Now we need to take this 28.5” waist circumference and find the radius.
I have found this the easiest way to actually draft it on paper. You can use actual math for
this, with a classic middle school geometry formula. But this is the era of the internet,
so you can also just look up a converter. I’ll link the one I used in the description box.
So for this 28.5” circle, I have a 4.5” radius. So now we’re ready to draft it out on paper. For
a quarter of a circle, I need a 90° angle. Starting from the angle, measure out 4.5”.
Then you can measure that out at different points and connect the dots, or if you have steady hands
you can use a string to swing out a nice curve. Then, before I forget, I’m going to draw a second
line 1/2” closer to the angle. This is where I’ll cut out my pattern, and the first line will
be my stitching line. But if you want a pattern without seam allowance, you can skip that part.
Now I can measure down from the cutting line by 29”, all across the outer curve.
connect those dots and this pattern is done and ready to cut out. I’ve built in seam and
hem allowance at the top and bottom edge, but I left the sides without any allowance. I think
this is most convenient to use, but you can add seam allowance here if you’d prefer, but
whichever you choose you should definitely mark the pattern. Now check that back, measuring it,
and you should come very close to 7.125”, or whatever your quarter waist measurement was.
And congratulations, pattern #1 is done! The next two will also be simple. For the
gathered and pleated full circle skirts, I just need to double and triple that waist measurement,
giving us 57” and 85.5”, and then find those radius measurements, which are 9” and
13.625”. Then they can be patterned along a 90° angle, just the same as the previous skirt.
This is my gathered full circle skirt, with a radius of nine inches,
giving me an inner curve of 14.25”. And here’s what it looks like compared to my first pattern.
For the pleated full circle skirt, with a 300% waist circumference,
I don’t need to pattern it because I just did that when I made my Christmas dress last
month. That project is what inspired this little pattern-making endeavor. I usually just cut out
my skirts from measurements, but in the name of efficiency, I realized that just having a good,
versatile variety on hand would be worth the effort. This way I can see what they’ll look
like ahead of time, and try different versions out on paper to see what fits my fabric best.
Here is what those three patterns look like, and I am quickly running out of floor space.
Now, let’s move on to our next variety. I’m gong to come back to the 3/4 skirts later, so we’ll
work on the half-circle skirts. The big difference here, is that a quarter of this skirt is actually
going to be an 1/8th of a circle. So instead of this curve equaling 7.125”, actually half of that
needs to measure 7.125. Which means that this full theoretical inner circle needs to measure double
28.5”, making it 57”. So, finding the radius of 57”, we come to 9”. For the gathered skirt,
we need to double 57, giving us 114, and for the pleated skirt we need to triple it, giving us 171.
The radii of those are 18.125 and 27.25. Now these three are ready to be patterned,
but one thing is different. Instead of a quarter of a circle, or a 90° angle, we are patterning
only half of that, so an 1/8th of a circle, or a 45° angle. I only have a tiny protractor,
really not meant for these types of projects. So I find it easier just to take a right angle and fold
that in half. But the method is exactly the same. Draw a curve using one radius, mark the length,
cut it out. Simple. And here are these three skirt patterns all laid out. So you can see they
are just as the circle skirts at the top edges, but their sides flare out much less. Like, half.
Now I’m going to repeat this entire process again, halving and doubling the measurements to
make a quarter circle skirt, which is basically an a-line skirt or a skirt that is almost straight,
but has a tiny bit of flare. I’m not sure if I would ever use the fitted version of this, because
I tend to prefer full skirts. But I definitely might use the pleated and gathered versions.
These patterns are great for skirts that you want to gather, but you want to still be pretty slim.
They give the look of gathers, but without the fullness up top that comes with gathering a
completely straight skirt. I’ll probably use one of these patterns when I make this dress,
where it has light gathers but you can see by the stripes that it also has some flare.
So, this time we’ll only be patterning a 1/16th of a full circle, and the curve of 1/16th must equal
7.125. So 7.125 multiplied by 16 gives us 114” for the fitted circumference, and 228 and 342
for the pleated and gathered circumferences. These all translate into radii of 18.125,
36.25, and 54.375. Am I loosing you yet? To pattern them, you need a 22.5° angle, or
you can take a right angle and fold it in half for an 1/8th, then fold that in half to find 1/16th.
Then they can be patterned in the usual manner. With the fitted version, it’s slim enough to
fit closely around the hips, so you might want to check it. measure the distance between your waist
and the fullest part of your hip, and mark that on your pattern. Now measure the fullest part of
your hips. Divide that by four, and compare it to width of your pattern at the corresponding part.
If you have a more hourglassy figure, with a wider gap between your waist and hip measurements,
this might be tight. In that case, you can just add a bit of a slope to
the pattern to ease it out over your hips. I did find that here the radii were so long
that it would have been extremely impractical to try and pattern them the same as I did the others.
So I took a shortcut by subtracting the radii from each other and measuring out each
waistline on the same piece. So start at your first waist measurement and go down 18.125”.
I traced this onto fresh paper with a rolley wheel tool, I have no earthly clue what they are called.
But mine is sharp enough to make an indentation on the paper below, which I could then go and
trace with a pen. Then I could extend the lines down, and there’s the 200% pattern.
Repeat this one more time for the 300% pattern. Now there is one last variation I want to make,
and that is a 3/4 circle skirt. Sometimes a full circle is just too much, or you don’t
have quite enough fabric, but a half circle just seems lackluster. So I thought a nice
in-between option would be good to have on hand. To pattern a quarter of this skirt, you will
be using 3/16th of a circle, and you need that inner curve to equal 7.125”. So how we find the
circumference of our theoretical full circle is by taking 7.125 and dividing it by three to find
1/6th, which for me was 2.375. Then that number can be multiplied by 16, which came out to exactly
38”. So, just to recap, 38” is the circumference of the theoretical inner circle, of which we will
only be using 3/4. You can verify your measurement by multiplying it by .75. If you end up with your
waist measurement again, you did it right. So 38” can be doubled and tripled, giving
us 76” and 114”, and these measurements can be converted, giving us radii of 6, 12, and 18.125.
To pattern the skirts, we need an angle of 67.5°. I’m actually just going to take my quarter circle
and my half circle and add them together. And the rest of the patterning is the same from here.
And here’s what they all look like. Was that a lot? I feel like that was a lot. Does your brain
hurt yet? Well, mine does too, but that’s why I just wanted to get it all done, so that I have
them, and for future projects I can just pick one and not have to worry about this math ever again.
Now I feel like I need to go burn a sacrifice to appease the gods of paper waste. Except
burning anything sounds… wasteful. But, I don’t think it’s a waste.
These patterns will go to good use, and in the long term they will probably save me from
a lot of future waste. I won’t need to make individual skirt patterns for future projects,
and I won’t waste fabric by messing up my measurements. For the type of sewing I do,
this set will make almost any skirt I need. For you, you might not need 12 whole patterns,
but I hope I’ve shown that no matter what kind of pattern you want to make,
the principles are the same. So, if you’d like to see more of my work, you can subscribe to
me here on youtube and go follow my instagram. For my next project, I’ll be repatterining and
remaking this old jumper dress, which has been the number one request since I started making
videos. And I also have a second channel, if you enjoy worldbuilding or writing. See ya.