Circle Skirts

What to talk about next?! There are so many ideas for new things to make buzzing around in my head, but I can’t start talking about them until I’ve exhausted our “archive” of projects we’ve completed! I think I’ll rave about circle skirts next. As you may or may not have already discovered, Harriet is Queen of the Circle Skirts, and I am merely a tag-along! However, I shall attempt to convey their simplicity and wonderfulness! They are so easy because of the lack of complicated pattern pieces! Let’s imagine we’re making a simple circle skirt with an elasticated waistband. A bit like this in fact:



This is a circle skirt made from Ikea “Cecilia” fabric which is really good quality stuff and only £1.99/m! I love the colours on this version of it – goes with loads of things.

So basically, fold your material in half then in half again (checking the ninety-degree angle on the sides that share the corner where the centre of the material is) and draw two curves:

Ok, so it’s another rubbish Paint drawing (and I’ll have you know that semi-circles are seriously hard to draw…). But I hope you get the gist. Adjust how far the bottom line is away from the top line depending on how long you want the skirt to be.

Now you’ll have a big circle with a small circle cut out of the middle of it, once you’ve unfolded your material. This is our cheat's way of making a circle skirt by the way, others would tell you to do it properly (which we do do sometimes!!). Next: turn over the top of the small circle to the inside (measure the width of your elastic and add 1.5cms for seam allowance), pin and sew (leaving a gap of however wide your elastic is so that you can feed that through, with a safety pin attached to one end - and holding on to the other!). When cutting the elastic, put it round you where you want the skirt to sit, then stretch it a bit, so that it's fairly tight on you and cut it there (allowing for an overlap). Then overlap the elastic ends, once they've been through the casing, by a couple of centimetres. Stitch them together like this, because it's a strong way of holding the ends secure:Push the stitched ends into the casing and sew up the hole you left - and "ta-dahhh" you have a circle skirt!!

Flik

x

P.S. Hemming might be an idea...I almost forgot!