My last completed make for this year was a blue circle skirt. I don’t normally blog about all circle skirts I make, but I used so many historical techniques on this one I wanted to share.
The fabric is a lovely blue wool. It’s not very heavy, nor very tightly woven, which means that it drapes beautifully. The picture below shows the color best, I brightened the other pictures a bit more to show the details better.
I got 3m of fabric for this project, and knew I wanted to have it be between under-knee and kalf length somewhere, and as wide as possible. With a little piecing I managed to get one full circle and one 3/4 circle cut out. Lying flat, you can see how it’s much wider than a single full circle would be.
It did take a little piecing to make it this wide and long enough at the same time. I pieced the hem at two points so I could cut my circles in full from 1,5m wide fabric (the circles were cut with a 164cm diameter). You can see it if you know, but I suspect it’ll hardly be noticeable when wearing. Piecing li
The waistband was machined to one side, folded over and machined again in the stitchline so the stitching doesn’t show from the right side.
I also put a pocket in one of the seams, the pattern taken from the Truly victorian 1870’s underskirt pattern.
When I got around to doing closures, I didn’t really feel like putting in a zipper. So I pulled out another TV pattern (TVE23) and used the hooks-eyes + placket method described in there. I quite like the look of this finish.
The last thing to do was the hemming. I really wanted a minimal of machine stitching showing, so I decided to bind the hem. About 10m of bias tape was sewn onto the right side by machine, turned over and ironed to the wrong side and then sewn on by hand. It took about 3 hours to do the hand-sewing, but the clean hem is so worth it.
I’m very pleased with how this skirt came out, I love how it moves with all the volume, and the little historical details make me quite happy.
Atelier Nostalgia 
This skirt is gorgeous! I was going to sew a wide circle skirt so your post really helped a lot! So you actually used one whole circle and another 3/4 circle? I love the volume, it is so pretty! Thanks for sharing!
Thanks! Yes, reading back I think I did! If you ‘slash’ your circle (basically cut from the edge exactly to the middle) you can keep connecting circles to make a skirt wider. In this case I didn’t have quite enough to combine two, so it’s 1,75 circle ;), but that’s already enough to give a lot of fulness.
Great, thank you! I should have just enough fabric to try that 😊