Ruric-Amari Home » Belly Dance Costume » Burnoose

Circle Skirt for Cabaret Bellydance and Folkloric Dance

Photo credit M Enright

1. Design considerations
2. Create Your Patterns
3. How Much Fabric do you need?
4. Choose Your Fabric
5. Cut Your Fabric
6. Sew your Skirt
7. Hang the skirt to stretch.
8. Hem your skirt.

The following instructions assume:

1. You will be using an waistband with elastic in it, not a fitted waistband fastening with hooks or buttons.
2. Your waistband will be applied to the TOP of your skirt, not to the back.
3. Your fabric is DRAPEY, not DROOPY or STIFF (see Choosing Your Fabric, below)
4. The fabric is WOVEN, not knit.
5. There is no nap or other need to have all the pieces running the same way.

Design considerations:

• Circle skirts are made with 2-or-more half circles (I have used as many as five). The more half-circles, the heavier the skirt will be. If you are working with chiffon and don't want to show off your underpants, you will need more circles with larger waist openings (the gathering at the waist creates opacity). If you are working with silk charmeuse, do not use an elastic waistband if the skirt contains more than 3 half-circles - the weight is likely to pull the skirt to your knees.
• Some vendors describe three-half-circle ('c circle-and-a-half') skirts as 'Professional', and they do put on a nice display, as well as making it easy to have slits that show off your legs.
• If you are making a circle skirt, your skirt will have two side seams, and you probably want a seam at each of YOUR sides. If you need more room across the rear than across the front, then you will need a bigger opening across the rear than in the front. Or, you can cut the opening as though the front is the same size as the back and then gently ease/gather the extra inch or so in front.
• If you are making a circle-and-a-half skirt, position one seam at your center back, one seam over the top of your right leg, and one seam over the top of your left leg. This means there is one entire half circle in the front between the tops of your legs.
• If you mount your circle skirts like ballet skirts - that is, attach them to 'underpants' (trunks) made of woven fabric that have been fitted to you - your skirts will not ride up or twist, no matter how hard you dance. It also solves the problem of what to wear under the skirt - as long as your 'real' underpants are a little smaller than the trunks! Yes, you can wear (relatively lightweight) pantaloons under a skirt mounted on trunks.
• The Costume Goddess reminds us of how important it is to HANG YOUR SKIRT BEFORE HEMMING IT. Frankly, she's too conservative. If you hang it for only a couple of days you will almost certainly have to rehem it! What a drag! Hang your skirt for at least a WEEK and you won't have to redo 17 yards of hem because the bias in the skirt kept stretching out after you hemmed it. If you don't have a week, and your fabric is washable, you can try wetting it thoroughly and letting it hang until dry. (The weight of the water helps expedite the stretching). Good luck!
• If you need a circle skirt in a hurry, consider making a gored skirt. Make a gore pattern from one-sixteenth of a circle and then mark the grainline right down the middle... this eliminates a lot of the bias (and stretching of bias). Sew 12 - 16 of these gores together and you will have a very circular-looking skirt. It will drape differently than a 'real' circle skirt (because there's much less bias in it) but it will flare out very nicely.

Create Your Patterns

1. Decide how LONG your skirt needs to be.
   • Have a friend use a tape measure to determine how long the skirt must be. Put on a garment that has the waistband where you want YOUR waistband to be, then measure over the curviest part of your body to the floor, or top of foot, or ankle, or whereever you want it to end. You are measuring over the curviest part of your body (often your butt) because the length in the back must often be different from the length in the front in order to make the hem look parallel to the floor.
   • Recommended: Radius of waist opening pattern + the desired length of skirt. Applying a waistband to the TOP of your skirt is goind to add 1.5 inches of length to the total and that will be for your hem.
2. Waist-opening pattern. This pattern is a half-circle with a diameter that gives you enough room to get the skirt up over your hips.
   • The short way: if you are a woman with a hip measurement of up to 38 inches, and your skirt is composed of two half-circles, then a a half-circle with a 6-inch radius (12-inch diameter) will work for you.
   • The longer version: Divide your hip measurement by three, and then divide that measurement by the number of half-circles in your skirt. The result will be the radius of your pattern. Double the result for the diameter of your pattern.
   • Your version: If you are working out the perfect waist opening using pi, then remember that the diameter of waist opening will actually be an inch larger than your pattern when you use my recommended seam allowance of 1/2". Also keep in mind that the cut waist will have a lot of bias in it so unless you stay-stitch it BEFORE you cut (which can be awkward!) the waist opening will naturally 'grow' a little.
   • Make the pattern from cardboard and mark the radius on it, the hip measurement on it, and the number of panels in the skirt. You will end up with a small collection of these eventually and the markings will help you grab the one you need.
3. Skirt pattern.Decide whether to make yourself a skirt pattern or to do it by marking and cutting directly on the fabric.
   With a pattern:
   • Shira at Shira.net provides excellent instructions on how to make a pattern for the skirt and how to choose the right fabric for bellydancing costume.
   • If you choose to make a skirt pattern, make it out of a large piece of plastic (like a dropcloth or mulch cover) and make it a half-circle size, not a quarter-circle size. This allows you to cut your pattern without taping anything together and allows you to mark your fabric for cutting without folding fabric.
   •  
   Without a pattern:
   • Read my Fan-Fold Technique here on Ruric-Amari.com.
   • Kashmir at www.raqs.co.nz provides basic instructions on how to make a skirt WITHOUT a pattern.
   • If you choose to NOT make a circle skirt pattern, consider making a pattern for just the waist opening, since a 'little' mistake when cutting the waist opening can force you to change your design. For true peace of mind, test the pattern on a square of material that is slightly bigger than the pattern... it doesn't have to look like a skirt, it just has to show you if the opening is the right size!
4. Waistband: I normally don't make a pattern for these: I rip or mark directly on the cloth. 5-inches wide and from selvage to selvage is what I go for. If the hip measurement is larger than the fabric is wide, rip/cut two pieces and join them together.

How Much Fabric?

The following are ESTIMATES to help you get your project going, and may result in very useful scraps. Unless the fabric is extremely expensive, too much is better than too little, so buy a little extra. Besides, skirts need tops. The scraps from the short version estimate should allow you to cover a bra and make a choli or even a baby-doll top as well.

1. The short version: an average-sized woman (40-inch hip, 5-foot-six) will need 2.5 yards of 42-inch-wide fabric for each half-circle desired,
2. The longer version: Aziza at Zilltech.com gives clear instructions on how to create a skirt pattern and lay it out on fabric. I suggest you follow her directions to create a LITTLE paper pattern to scale on graph paper. Then make as many graph-paper-patterns as you intend to use in your skirt, and lay THEM out on graph paper that has been cut to scale to reflect the width of your fabric.
   • If your skirt design involves applying your waistband to the TOP of your skirt, and your fabric is wider than your hip measurement, add 6 inches of fabric to your total for the waistband and lay that on your 'paper fabric' as well before calculating yardage. If your hip measurement is wider than your fabric, add 12 inches.
   • If you are going to clean your skirt by washing it, then add a reasonable allowance for shrinkage. 10% is not too much for some fabrics.
   PS - Save these little templates - I use mine over and over as I go from project to project using material of various widths.

Choosing Your Fabric

• I use woven fabric, not knits. My choice. I prefer the look and feel. Silk charmeuse (19mm) is my mainstay because of its luster. I buy it in bolts and dye it to the color needed.
• I use natural fabrics not synthetics. Natural fabrics help your body stay cooler when hot. If you think that is no big deal, let me put it this way -- you will sweat a lot less and feel a lot better during an outside summer gig in silk than in polyester!
• The point of a circle skirt is to drape over your hips (using the woven fabric bias) wthout sticking out, and THEN flare out, so purchase a drapey fabric. If you don't know what you want, unroll a yard or two off the bolt and put your fist under the middle of the unrolled yardage. Is it draping? Drooping? A bit stiff like cardboard? What you see is what you will get. Don't buy it unless it DRAPES, no matter how perfect the color or pattern. Notable exception: soft droopy fabrics like chiffon can be made to work if you cut a LOT of half-circles and gather the waist a lot.
• Can it be cleaned? Sooner or later you will want to clean that costume. I prefer to be able to wash it on a gentle cycle (which the hand-dyed silk will allow me to do). You may be happy sending it to the cleaners. Your choice.

Cutting your fabric:

1. Skirt body: Lay your fabric on the floor /carpet /pushed-together tables, mark the shape of your skirt on it (with or without pattern), put two safety pins at the center waist, and then cut it. Don't worry about a rough edge; you'll be cutting a completely new hemline after you hang the skirt.
2. Waistband: Cut a waistband 5 inches wide and the circumference of your waist-opening pattern plus a couple of inches. Make it too long rather than too short. Ripping a 5" wide piece from selvage to selvage is the fastest way to do this. Or mark with a long ruler and cut. If your hip is wider than the fabric is wide, cut your waistband in two pieces.
3. Waist opening: Line the center of your waist-opening pattern with the pins at the center waist of the cut skirt bodies and mark the openings with your marker of choice (chalk, carbon paper, pencil, fabric marker, basting). Stay-stitch (sew a seam) about 1/4 inch on the outside of the mark. This is done BEFORE you cut to prevent the opening from stretching. Then cut your opening just inside the stay-stitching.

Sewing the Skirt

1. Sew the side seams together.
2. Attach the waistband and run some 1" (or wider) no-roll elastic through it. Secure the ends of the elastic with a safety pin. Having a waistband on the skirt during the hanging period will help keep it on the hanger properly and leaves you ready for the final fitting at a moments notice.

Hang your Skirt

You hang your skirt so that it will stretch BEFORE you hem it to the length you want it, not afterwards!
1. In the case of a not-too-full skirt with no seams on the bias, overnite will be fine.
2. In the case of skirts made of circles (or the double-square skirt with ruffled hem), you must hang your skirt for a week. Why? Because BIAS STRETCHES, and a skirt with lots of bias in it WILL STRETCH LIKE CRAZY for the first week. If you hem it immediately you will have to rehem it! What a drag!
3. If you don't have a week, and your fabric is washable, you can try wetting it thoroughly and letting it hang until dry. (The weight of the water helps expedite the stretching).

Hemming your Skirt

Hems now have their own special page, right [ HERE ].

The skirt in the picture on this page (and on the main Costume page) is a circle-and-a-half style made of silk Crepe de Chine and mounted on a black trunk. It hung for four weeks before it was hemmed. It has never stretched out of shape.