Sunday, July 5, 2009

Summer Skirts 2 - The Tiered Skirt



Only one photo today and the rest is all text (how ghastly).

The tiered skirt is a variation of the gathered skirt.
It is made of horizontal bands of fabric that are purposely
longer than they should be so each band can be gathered
to fit the band above. And the topmost band is gathered-
by-elastic to fit the wearer's waist. See?

This is a useful skirt to make when you are stuck with
long narrow strips of scraps. This pink tiered skirt looks
remarkably like the princess pavillion tent because
those are the leftover bits. And I do enjoy getting rid
of pink scraps as quickly as I can to make
room for other, more superior colors.

Again, because there are many tutorials out there already
(and I will shamelessly repeat this excuse in the next few
posts), I won't be including photographic instructions here.
What I will do is give you the dimensions of the fabric
pieces you need, and send you off googling the detailed
step-by-steps if you still need them.

Step 1
Decide how many tiers/bands you want. Pick a number greater than 2 to make it worth your while.
E.g. For Emily's skirt, I picked 3, because it is such a tiny skirt!

Step 2
Decide on the length of the skirt.
E.g. For Emily, this was 12". See the earlier post for an explanation.

Step 3
Measure the wearer's waist.
E.g. For Emily, this was 21.5".

Step 4
Determine the height of each band : Divide the length of the skirt in step 2 by the number of bands in Step 1. If this does not give you a whole number, add the extra inches to the bottom tier(s).
E.g. For Emily's skirt, I would be working with 3 bands, each 4" high (finished dimensions).

Step 5
Cut as many rectangles as bands needed. So for Emily's skirt, I cut 3 rectangles. Each one was longer than the one above it. How much longer is up to you. I found that if each rectangle was about 1.5 times longer than the one above it, you'll get some decent gathers.

You'll need to include seam allowances, so add 1/2" all round, except for the topmost edge of the skirt, where the elastic casing will be. Here, add 2" instead of 1/2", so there will be enough fabric to fold over into a casing for 1" elastic.


Aaaaaaaand here is where I give up writing text
instructions and send you off to make your own
skirt. But I also remembered seeing a tutorial on
one of my favorite tutorial sites, blueprints, (previously
Just Tutes) on making a tiered skirt. So I went and
found that for you. Or you can wait till the end of
the series and use my cheat sheet.

Next: The gathered panel skirt!

1 comment:

  1. Thanks so much for your nice tutorial and also for the link to the tutorial on Blueprint. With these two tutorials I managed to FINALLY make a twirly skirt for my daughter:
    http://muffinsnmore.blogspot.com/2009/09/twirly-skirt.html

    I also put a link to your tutorial in the post.

    ReplyDelete

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