Wednesday, May 5, 2010

And another thing...




I've been going a little crazy with this skort thing - once I get the creative juices flowing it's a bit hard to stop sometimes.

Here's a knit version of the skort. This one is just a little bit different. I decided to cut a circle skirt instead of doing a gather of the bottom tier. (See yesterdays skort stack post for all the nitty gritty). The circle skort sews up about the same as the gathered skorts we did yesterday and uses the same measurements, so please refer back to that post for details.

If you want to copy this version you will need to do a little geometry. Remember the formula for the circumference of a circle? It's 2(3.14)r. (Sorry, I can't figure out how to do the pi symbol
on blogger. Silly blogger.) So to figure out how large to make the circle you calculate backwards solving for 'r'. You already know that the circumference is going to be the measurement of the top tier which was 37" on my skorts. So I need to figure out 'r' in order to draw out the circle. In my case it comes out to approximately 6" if I round up. That's the inner circle. Then I decided to make the skort length 12" and just added an outer circle at 12" to make my pattern.
The resulting half donut pattern ~

Place the pattern along the fold of the fabric and when it's all cut out, we end up with this (folded in half)


All the other parts of the skort are cut out just the same as yesterday. Now you can sew the top tier of the skort onto this circle just as in the skort tute.
Sew it all together following the rest of yesterday's tutorial.


Ta da!
Since this is a knit, I decided to play around with my cover pro for a change. I topstitched this using the cover stitch and that produced a nice effect on the bottom tier and on the waistband. Kind of ready-to-wear-esque.


I decided to leave the hem edge raw and used the cover stitch again. I like the result.The possibilities are endless. You can do this same sort of circle skort in a woven fabric, it doesn't have to be a knit. Since this skort is entirely knit, if you do decide to topstitch with a standard sewing machine, be sure and use a stretch stitch - such as a 3-stitch zigzag for the topstitch to prevent your stitches from breaking when the fabric is stretched.

Whenever I sew with knits, I always get a lot of questions about knits in general. I have gone over a few pointers on sewing with knits at the bottom of a previous blogpost. Coincidentally, Patty Young as also commented on sewing with knits today over on The Creative Connection Blog - click here to read her tips on sewing with knits.

Tune in tomorrow for yet another, less knitty skort variation.

Happy Sewing!


1 comment:

CraftCrave said...

Just a quick note to let you know that a link to this post will be placed on CraftCrave today [06 May 03:00pm GMT]. Thanks, Maria