Welcome to the Skirt Pattern Instructions. Here you’ll be able to find a step by step guide on how to draft your first basic skirt. I have good news for you, skirts are one of the easiest and quickest patterns to draft. So get your pen and paper and let’s get started!!
This pattern is the base for designs like the pencil skirt, tulip or wrap skirts, sky’s the limit.
The first thing we have to do before we start drafting is take the right measurements. We’re only going to need 4 measurements. When taking them, wear the underwear you’d normally wear under your skirt and make sure the measuring tape is not too tight around your body. Don’t worry if you feel the measurements are a bit off, you’ll be able to fix that during the prototyping phase!
Measure around your natural waist. This normally sits just below your rib-cage and in most cases is the thinnest part of your body.
Measure around your hips. If the wides part of your bottom is lower than your hips, measure that circumference. Also, if you have a prominent ass it’s better if you measure the from hip arc (side to side) and the back hip.
Measure how long you want the skirt to be from where you measured your waist, down. Modifying the length later on is really easy, so don’t worry too much.
Measure from where you measured your waist to where you measured your hips. Take this measurement from the side of your body.
Step number one is to build the structure of our culotte foundation. We start at the top left and mark 0.
Once the main structure is ready, let’s draw the main lines that will define the shape of the culottes.
Next step is to draw the Waist. For that we’ll need to make some assumptions about darts.
Darts are our way to create rounder shapes in the pattern. Every body will need different measurements. The rules are:
As a standard dart measurement you can use:
As explained before, darts will depend on your body. This is the standard way of drawing them but use the ones that suit you best.
The basic skirt foundation is known for being straight. To finish the draft, just draw lines from 0 to 1, from 3 to 2 and a perpendicular line to the hip line, from 5 down.
To finish the pattern, draw the final curves:
And there you go, with this skirt pattern instructions you have finished another one of the basic blocks! A small thing you can check is to measure the side seam for both front and back patterns. They should be the same measurement.
For more information on how to modify this pattern, click here.
