A lot of skirts

The task that determined our grades for the 30 skill point course from January to mid-April was to make several skirts in 1930's style for a theatrical production. We had to make the patterns based on a basic pattern and cut and sew the skirts.

We had to make at least two skirts each, but I ended up making four. The first two were basic bell-shaped skirts, one made of 8 pieces, the other of 6 pieces.

With the 8-piece skirt, the two half-patterns had to be cut into half to get four pieces. Then those were cut in half and the halves angled as shown below. So you add wedges in the middle of each of the four pieces. Finally, you cut two pieces of fabric per pattern piece to get 8 parts.

Below is the finished skirt made this way.

The 6-piece skirt is made using the same principle, except you cut the pattern pieces to 1/3 and 2/3 of the original width and place the 1/3 piece on fold.

The resulting skirt isn't that much different from the 8-piece skirt, just has two vertical seams less.

As I was watching a video about 1930's fashion in Finland, I saw some interesting ones, and the third skirt I made was different from the first two. In this case, the bell-shaped part starts about 1/3 down the skirt. Otherwise, it's an 8-piece skirt.

The video also showed a lot of pleated skirts. The common theme with those was that the pleats started fairly low, around mid-thigh. There were different variations of this, but I wanted to make a yoke skirt. So the fourth skirt had a yoke and wide pleats. The picture below shows the bottom part after stitching the pleats.

The skirt was size 44, so it was a bit too big for me, but I still decided to try it on. I just put it on over my jeans to get an idea of how it looks. As I was doing this, I mentioned to the teacher that "I'd wear a skirt like this," so she said "next you can make one for yourself."

I didn't have the fabric for that, so I started with the pattern as I needed size 42. After a visit to a fabric store, I was ready to make a skirt for myself. The main difference with it was the smaller size and shorter length. With legs like mine, the length in the above picture is about the worst possible, so I made a knee-length skirt for myself. All my other skirts are in fairly subdued colors (various shades of blue with a bit of white), so I chose something a bit more colorful for this one.

The weather hasn't been very nice lately, so I haven't had a chance to wear this yet, but I will as soon as it gets warmer. And the grade? I'm happy to tell that I got 5 on a scale of 1-5. I'm not that set on getting great grades, but of course it's always nice to get a good one. It's just not as important for me as it is for the young students who need good grades for applying to wherever it is they want to go later.