DIY half circle skirt tutorial

Hello Everyone!

I hope your week has been going super! Thanks so much to everyone who liked and commented on Monday’s skirt post. If you missed it you can click here and read all about it. I really do love the skirt. So much so that I wanted to put together a quick tutorial on how I made it.

If you are new to circle skirts. They over all are a quick make and really don’t require a pattern. You can fold your fabric and draw it on with a tailors chalk or wash away pen, cut and sew. The biggest thing is finding the radius of your waist measurement. There is an actual formula that requires simple high school math.

You do this by dividing your waist measurement by pi (or 3.14) and round off your answer to the nearest quarter of an inch.

my waist is 35″ + 1″ for fitting ease= 36″ divided by pi (3.14) = 11.46. So the radius of my waist measurement is 11.50″

If you opt to use this method. You can add your seam allowance after you draw out your skirt as I illustrate in the tutorial. Or you can simply add your seam allowance to your waist measurment. i.e. waist =35+ 1″ fitting ease+ 1/2″ seam allowance per seam (4 seams) = 38″.

The other and easy way to find your waist radius is to use a circle skirt calculator. My favorite one is from By Hand London.com I love it because it includes your seam allowance for you (if your making a 2 seam skirt. If you want to add a back seam you have to make sure to increase your waist measurement by your desired seam allowance) as well as gives your length measurement for a mini, midi, or maxi length. Here’s the link to the app. Its a handy little tool that I use alot.

Once you’ve figured out your radius and desired length you can follow along with the tutorial that I created in Adobe llustrator below.

Supplies: