It’s been such a long time since I busted out the sewing machine and actually made something for myself. Especially something I liked enough to really wear. I felt really inspired and after a short trip to JoAnn’s, I came home with a few yards of a soft light blue denim. After playing around with a few ideas I decided to make a simple high waisted circle skirt. This cute, simple diy isn’t as in depth as I would normally go but will show you all in a general sense how I made it.

First thing to do is measure the circle out. Not going to lie, I’m awful at math and measurements so I had to wing this part a bit. Somehow it managed to work out. After figuring out that my waist size was 30 inches I calculated the radius I would need to measure would be 9.5 inches. I measured that and marked a quarter circle in the center with chalk. Then drew out another partial circle 22 inches further out for the entire length of the piece. (My cut circle ended up being double the size it needed to be, so I ended up cutting in half and only using one half for this skirt. If I wanted it to the right size to begin with I should have divided 9.5 in half since I measured it out on folded fabric.) See? I told you I was bad at math.

This picture shows how I folded the fabric up on itself twice to draw out my circle shapes and actually cut the fabric. It made the entire process a lot easier since the fabric was a quarter of the size it would have been fully unfolded.

When I opened up the circle of fabric I had to cut the entire thing in half in order for it to fit. The other half I am going to be using for the skirt of a dress later so at least that won’t go to waste.

The two edges are going to become the side seam of this skirt, so next I went ahead and pinned up my seam and then sewed it together. Before putting in the stitching I measured out the length of the zipper I planned on putting in and made sure that the zipper area was done with a less tight, loose stitch so that I could pull it out easier later.

In order to sew in my zipper, I first sewed the edges of the zipper into the seam edges that I had ironed flat.  Then I went around around the zipper very closely through all the layers of fabric. To finish the closure I ripped out the stitching in the front that I had left loose intentionally using a seam ripper.

Now after the zipper was secured, I tried on the skirt just to make sure it fit and realized it was still a little bit loose for where I wanted the garment to fall. I pinned up the opposite side of the piece and sewed straight down creating a second seam and tightening up the fit so that it was nice and snug.

Lastly, it was time for edging and hemming. I hemmed in the top of the skirt, and used some white fabric to trim out the raw edge on the hem of the skirt.

Overall, I love the way this piece turned out! Can’t wait to wear it around this summer! And now that my machine is out and about I think I’m going to be sewing more frequently so keep looking in for more ideas for fun projects that you can do yourself at home! >>