Make a Circle Skirt Using LESS Fabric

I decided to step out of my comfort zone and not use a pattern to make this skirt!  We used a circle skirt calculator (from Mood) to calculate her waist circumference.  Then she decided on a length and I was afraid there wasn’t enough fabric to make it the length she had her heart set on.  There was NOT enough fabric to cut it out in the traditional way, so after a lot of pattern tetris I finally figured out how to make a circle skirt using less fabric than normal. 

If you’ve been around here any time at all, you know we love circle skirts!  There’s probably not enough good things we can saw about circle skirts.  And so we decided to do a couple of tutorials about circle skirts.  

The only downside we can find about circle skirts is that they take more fabric than your average skirt.  In fact, we already have one tutorial about how to make a circle skirt from narrow fabric.  Today’s tutorial is similar: how to use less fabric when making a circle skirt.

First way to use less fabric: add side seams!!  Two semi circles use less fabric than a whole circle.  And here’s the tutorial on how to use less fabric when making a circle skirt.

1. Lay out your fabric flat instead of folded in half.  In your mind, think of the four corners as 1, 2, 3, and 4.  

2. Grab corners 3 and 4 and fold them up past corners 1 and 2 until you have the desired finished length (don’t forget the hem allowance!) of your circle skirt left.  In other words, the doubled part of the fabric will be the length of your circle skirt.  (This is assuming you have accounted for the waist circumference also.)  So in the picture above, the waist circumference is 4.5 inches and the length of the circle skirt is 27 inches.  This makes the total area of doubled fabric 32 inches (allowing for a little extra there.)

Cut out the circle skirt quarter circles for the waist and skirt.

3. Unfold the fabric and lay it out flat again.  Next grab corners 1 and 2 and pull them down over the top of corners 3 and 4 until you again have the length of your circle skirt.  Or, the doubled part fits your pattern piece.

Once you open the fabric piece back up, the cutouts show you how you nestled the skirt pieces right next to each other and used less fabric!

We used this method when making TWO circle skirt recently!  Here you can see the results.  This fabric was given to us by a dear friend, and Aria absolutely claimed this as her own.

Of course I had to make her twirl to show off the fullness of a full circle skirt…bet you can’t even find the side seams because of the business of the fabric and the fullness of the skirt.

Aria also requested an inseam pocket in her circle skirt…stay tuned for that tutorial.