a winter skirt

It has been pretty frigid here in New York. I was wearing my black flannel circle skirt today. That skirt was so quick to make, and just looks good on. Another wool skirt to wear every day, seemed like just the thing. I started poking around in my stash and found a length of chocolate brown herring bone wool from a http://www.fabricmartfabrics.com/ fabric bundle from a couple of years back.

Directions for a Circle skirt
I formed the yardage into a right triangle, cut off the rest and ended up with a perfect square, a trick I learned when making fortune tellers in third grade. Then I folded the square in 1/2, and in 1/2 again ending up with a smaller square. Then I placed one the two "closed sides" of the square on the other, ending up with an oddly shaped triangle. I then pretended to be a compass, and drew an arc along the open end of the triangle with the tailor's chalk my friend Ann gave me as a house gift ( Thanks Ann! ).

I cut along that line. There are formulas for calculation how big to cut the waistline of a circle skirt. i must confess that each time I look at those formulas it gives me a headache. I find it easier to roughly eyeball how big to cut the waist. you need to cut it much smaller than you think, not only is the arc you are cutting only 1/4 of your waist, if you fold over the waist to edge it, it will automatically become larger. So I cut an arc that was a bit too small which was easy to rectify. I then cut a slit for the zipper and installed it.

I often will face skirt waistlines with 2 inch elastic, a trick I learned from a Donna Karan pair of trousers. This time though I added a 1/2 inch strip of WWII era Khaki green twill tape that I had purchased from the Scalamandre factory. The twill tape was part of their contribution to the war effort. I added a hook and an eye to the top of the zipper and then serged and then turned the skirt hem. Hemming the skirt was boring--it's a long hem.

That's it, a nice distraction from a pains-taking piece that I will show photos of soon.

The photo below shows the texture of the fabric, but gets none of the warm color, trust me, it's the color of a Hershey's milk chocolate bar. Like the chocolate, there are lots of pink undertones in the wool and it will look great with a pink cardigan.

My dress from is about 7 inches shorter than I am. The skirt is about knee length, but it will probably be worn with the pair of boots in the photo.