Circle Skirt App Review

Do you like circle skirts? I was kind of indifferent to the idea, but I love love love them now!! When I saw this floral textured fabric at Fabricland, I immediately knew it would become my first circle skirt. I don’t entirely remember what tuned me into them. I think I saw a few dresses on pinterest or in my blogroll where sewists attached a circle skirt to any ol’ bodice. At any rate, I remembered reading about By Hand London’s circle skirt app when it first came out and thought, ‘meh, that’s too much work’.

But it’s not much work, really. Quite simply, you input your waist measurement, the type of circle skirt you want (1/4, 1/2, full), your desired length (mini, midi, full length) and BOOM, the circle circumference and fabric requirements pop out. What more could you want?!

Well… I have a couple of comments about that, actually.

1. First, maybe this is my own stupidity, but it would have been nice to have a note saying that you should reduce the waistband size when using knit fabrics. Mind you, the app states it is strictly for woven fabrics, but you can easily adapt it to knit fabrics I think. If you reduce the waistband by (anyone know by how much?) a bit, and stretch as you sew, it would work beautifully.
2. It says for me that the mini half circle skirt WILL NOT work on 115cm wide fabric. That is not entirely true, at least not for a small to medium size waistline (mine is 72cm). If you fold your fabric on the crossgrain, you can easily get a half circle skirt out of it (or even a full circle skirt if you have double the fabric). I did it for a summer dress. I got it cut out of a scant 2m of 115cm wide fabric.

These are just a couple of things I found out while using the app, and by all means does not mean you shouldn’t use it. Just use your brain and get creative. It’s just a starting point. For example, I’m also going to tweak the half circle skirt to include side-seam pockets.

This one I made is a full circle skirt, ‘mini’ length, with in-seam pockets from Deer & Doe’s Chardon skirt pattern. I made the pattern on a piece of wrapping paper. Using a sturdy piece of wrapping paper/kraft paper is good if you intend to use it many times. The only thing is, it tends to want to roll up… I now have it pinned to my wall and it’s flattened out nicely now.