"Kilted Skirts" -- fabric weight

[Todd Bradshaw]

I stuck my wife's long 16 oz. wool skirt (the light blue/red tartan above) on the UPS scale and it came out at one and three quarter pounds. That's not bad, compared to my 8 yard kilt, since the skirt has no pleats with hidden fabric, and no lining or apron overlaps you save considerable weight and cloth. The bias cut without pleats also really hangs nicely with most fabrics in a kind of no-muss, no-fuss, but still pretty elegant way. The pattern is as simple as it could be, as long as you have double-width cloth, just a radiused bottom and top, with a right angle for the side seams.



The edge on the right is lined up with the edge of the cloth. She cuts two of these pieces, sews them together with a short zipper at the top of one seam, adds a waistband and sews a hem. She has skirts cut to this basic pattern from a variety of fabrics, from the heavy tartan all the way down to some sort of silky summer prints (I don't know what those fabrics are called, I'm a sailmaker, not a fashion designer). She says that with single-width cloth it can be done, but you use four pieces, instead of two, and you have to orient them differently (no bias cut) with the weave of the cloth running straight down the middle of each piece.

She is currently finishing up a "test dress" where she combined that bias-cut skirt style with a shirt pattern and made one garment that buttons all the way down to the hem in front. This one is from a hunk of non-tartan plaid wool that we found on eBay. Once it's done and de-bugged, we have a lighter weight piece of our tartan to make one from. It should be pretty neat, and it's always nice to go to highland games accompanied by the best dressed gal in the park.