Have you ever seen a picture of a garment and you absolutely had to have it? When you can sew clothing this can be a fun problem… but you may want to make everything you see! I saw an Instagram posts that showed this skirt with these simple steps. That was it, I was inspired and away I went.

I guessed I would need 8 yards of two sided yarn dyed fabric. I got a beautiful linen look fabric locally at the Dayton Sewing Collaborative. I love this because they sell second hand fabric at a fraction of the cost.

Playing in the donations at the Dayton Sewing Collaborative.

After resting my fabric for months I decided the skirt fabric I chose might be a little heavy handed for this design. This means it may not suitably drape well if I made it floor length. This was why I decided to go with a shorter version of the same design. I’m glad I did because I wouldn’t have had enough fabric for floor length.

I drafted my pattern knowing it could come out “wearing me” or look like rags. I went with it anyways.

You don’t need to draft an actual pattern for circle skirts. They are really easy and there’s plenty of great YouTube tutorials out there. I went ahead and drafted pattern only because I’m collecting an arsenal of my flat pattern blocks to mix and match pieces. This pattern can be a dress with any one of my basic flat pattern blocks attached to it.

I cut my main circle skirt and then 8 more flounces, aka cascading ruffles. Before I could sew I had to let them hang overnight. This is because parts cut on the bias will grow longer with gravity. Then the fun part, I used a surged rolled hem all around my cascading ruffles to finish them. These ruffles are cut circles like in diagram picture number one.

My first problem was I had to figure out how to get the eight circle flounces evenly on my circle skirt with a back zipper. When I folded and pressed my pattern paper it came to me, BOOM! I would fold my skirt into eighths. This worked!

Crawling around on the floor for hours pinning the cascade ruffles and top stitching them down was the most challenging part. This skirt was huge to sew although pretty easy on my industrial machine.

Now do you like it with or without the crinoline?

What a fun project!

Behind the scenes~

Since starting in October I’ve made over 40 flat pattern blocks.

Next Dayton Garment Designers Meet Up. (more info in the Facebook Group)

Thank you for Reading,

Tracy McElfresh

Dream It! sew It!

Tracy McElfresh
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