Circle Skirt

I successfully finished my first-ever sewing project!

I made a circle skirt that looks totally legit and that I fully intend to wear in public all the time. I'm so excited about it!

Look how fun it is to twirl in:

I used this circle skirt tutorial from Made to make a prototype of my skirt out of muslin.  When I tried on the prototype, I decided to add an inch of length all the way around the skirt as well as an extra 1. 75 inches of length in the back so that the skirt would look like it's the same length in the front and the back even though I have more to cover in the back.

When I was drawing my pattern and I was making the back of the skirt longer than the front, I made the entire back half of the circle one length and then gradually made the other half shorter, so only the front quarter of the skirt was the shortest length.  This made sense in my head while I was making the pattern, but once I tried on the skirt I realized I had made a mistake; the front and the back of the skirt look like they're the same length, but the sides of the skirt look longer than everywhere else.

That's how I learned that I should have made the entire front half of the skirt the shortest length and then gradually transitioned to the longest length in the back half of the skirt.  If I had done that, I think the sides would not look longer than the front and the back.

Have you ever made a circle skirt that was a little longer in the back than the front?  Do you think that the lesson I learned from this project is correct?

Oh, and do you see that serged edge on the bottom of the skirt?  Once I made a pattern out of muslin (using the math equations from the awesome Made tutorial plus my own 1.75 inch addition to the length of the back of the skirt) and once I had traced the pattern onto my real fabric, I cut out the skirt and serged the bottom edge of the circle as well as the top edge that would go around my waist.  Then I measured the length of elastic I needed to go around my waist and sewed it together to make a circle.  I finished it off by pinning that elastic waistband onto the skirt and sewing it all together.

I used a 1 inch elastic for the waistband because it was navy blue and matched the fabric, but if Joann's had had 2 inch elastic in the correct color, I would have preferred to use that just for aesthetic reasons.  I don't love the feeling of an elastic band digging into my stomach, so I made the waistband fairly loose.

I love that sewing my own skirt meant that I could make that waistband as loose as I wanted it to be, and that the back of the skirt could be a little longer than the front so it would sit properly on my body type.

I'm totally addicted to sewing now!

I'm thinking of making a high/low skirt for my next project...

Happy stitching!
xoxo
Laura