How to Make a Strip Skirt
Ellen MarchDescription
Homemade strip skirts are great projects for sewers of all ages and skill levels. The technique isn’t too challenging, and there’s plenty of room to get creative with your fabric and pattern choices. In this free video lesson, expert seamstress Ellen March teaches you how to make a fun and elegant strip skirt with an elastic waistband that can be worn on any woman, regardless of shape or size. She demonstrates each step of the easy process from the initial pattern layout to the final hem, and discusses all the ways you can improvise to make your strip skirt beautiful, unique, and comfortable!
Creating the Strip Skirt Pattern
First things first, Ellen shows you how to draw the pattern for your strip skirt, which can be done on pattern tissues, newspaper, cardboard, or whatever else you want to use. To do so, you’ll begin by measuring your waist and dividing by 6. This will give you the length of your skirt’s top, adjusting as necessary up to 2 inches for seam allowance. Then measure the length, which will depend on your skirt type. Ellen is making a maxi skirt for a toddler, so her top is 8 ¼ inches and her bottom is 13 ¼.
Cutting, Finishing, and Sewing the Strip Skirt Segments
Once you have your pattern, go ahead and cut six segments. These can be the same fabric and design, or you can experiment with variations to create a truly unique strip skirt! With your pieces cut, you’ll finish each of the edges with a serger, cutting off a ½-inch from each side. Although finishing with a serger simplifies the seaming process, you can also use a zigzag finish if you don’t have or don’t want to use a serger.
Next, sew your segments together. Ellen recommends sewing the front three together and the back three separately and then sewing these pieces at the side seam, but you can do this step however you’d like. By this point, you’ll have the body of your skirt complete!
Attaching the Waistband
When you’re ready to sew in the elastic waistband, Ellen says you have a couple of options to consider. You can certainly opt for elastic with casing and account for seam alignment, but she prefers fold-over elastic. This type of elastic is great for woven and strip skirts, as it’s a super soft and comfortable material that’s used in baby diapers.
Ellen likes to use the widest available width of elastic to simplify the process of zigzagging. In addition to width choices, you’ll also decide whether you want to have the matte or shiny side of the elastic showing on the outside. Totally your call.
Whatever you decide, when you head over to the machine you’ll want to match the top of the fabric with the center fold of the elastic (which is already created for you if you choose fold-over). Ellen shows you how to stretch the elastic as you sew between the seams of each segment, which will give the strip skirt a snug-but-not-tight fit. Always remember to put the needle in the down position as you adjust, if your machine doesn’t automatically do so.
What’s Left?
The only thing left to do after you’ve fully sewed on the elastic is to hem the bottom of the skirt. Hemming a skirt is also your preference, and is another opportunity to get creative. You can choose to double-turn the hem, which is what Ellen tends to do, or you can add accent fabric or any other hemming solution you like!
If you enjoyed this project and you can’t wait to get going on another, we recommend learning how to make a circle skirt. And once you’ve nailed both of these, dig back through our archives to discover so many more great projects!
I'm gonna show you how to make a strip skirt using your own pattern. It's super easy and all you need is a big sheet of paper. And I actually have pattern tissue here, but you can certainly use newspaper, you could use a bunch of pieces of paper taped together, whatever you have on hand. So the first thing that you want to do, well actually I should first say that I'm calling this a strip skirt, but it's really just a skirt with six gores. So you can call it a six-gored skirt if you like, it's all up to you, you're the designer. So the first thing you want to do is measure your waist. We're gonna do everything with the waist measurement. So I'm gonna work off of a 37 and a half inch waist. So once you get that number, you're gonna divide by six and then add two for seam allowances, and it seems like a lot to add two inches for a seam allowance, but I'm just adding in a bunch of ease, a bunch of ease, just to give myself a safety net. But you could certainly just add an inch if you're more comfortable with using half inch seam allowances. But I'm just gonna use two to make sure I have a nice full skirt. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna take, let's see, I would be using eight and a quarter as my measurement with a 37 and a half inch waist. So I just draw eight and a quarter, and there's the top of my skirt, and you can label it eight and a quarter, skirt top. You don't have to label it, whatever you want. And then you're gonna decipher how long you want your skirt to be. So I like mine to hit the floor, and this is a maxi skirt kind of pattern that I'm dealing with, so what I do is I just take the top of the tape measure, I'm working with the right side, and drop it to the floor. And you can have a friend assist you if you need or you can step on it and kinda look at it. I mean, this is a real loose-y goose-y pattern. So once you figure out how long you want it to be, measure how long, and this would be 18. I'm just eyeballing it. Let's say 36. So then I add five inches to my eight and a quarter measurement. So that's gonna give me 13 and a quarter, and I just draw that down here. And now, you just wanna connect your lines, and it's just a gradual angle here that you're doing. And you do wanna make sure that your centers are lined up with your top and bottom line, so you can take some more care than I'm doing to ensure that you're gonna have a symmetrical piece. All right, that is all there is to it. That is our pattern piece that we're gonna use for the entire skirt. So then, you obviously would need to cut it out, and here's one that's all nice and symmetrical. You can also double check by folding it in half and making sure that your lines meet up. So here's our piece, and I have actually made a little baby pattern piece, because it's kind of cumbersome to have all of this fabric on this little table to show you how it all gets constructed. So here's our little piece, and you're gonna cut six of these from your fabric. Now, I've chosen to do just one fabric for the whole skirt, but this is an opportunity where you can really have fun with fabric and you can use an entire collection of quilting cottons, and this is also, I might add, a great way to use quilting cottons in something wearable, because oftentimes you love these fabrics but you don't wanna walk around the street looking like a quilt. So this is a good chance to use up those fabrics and really have fun with it. So you can use two different fabrics, you can use three different fabrics, you can use six different fabrics. The choice is yours. So once you have all six pieces cut from using your pattern piece, you're gonna finish the edges, and what I did was I just used a serger and I ran them through the serger and I actually cut off half an inch on the serger blade as I was going through. And you just assembly line it and rock 'em out, and I do this before I actually sew the seam, just because it makes life so much easier because you wanna make sure that they're finished independently and not together, and if you do them all first, then they don't get in the way and you're not gonna accidentally clip the seam as you're zigzag finishing or serge finishing. So you can also zigzag finish if you don't wanna break out the serger or if you don't have a serger. So finish all of your edges nice and cleanly, and then we're just gonna start sewing them together. So we will head on over to the sewing machine and I'll show you how to do that. You can see that I've got the majority of this little girl's skirt sewn together already, and what I actually like to do is sew the first three panels for the skirt front, and then the three panels for the skirt back, and then sew them together at the side seams. And I'm not really sure why I do it that way, there's really no method to the madness, but I guess I'm used to sewing skirts that way, so that's how I'm sewing this one together. So you're just matching up your seams, put everything right sides together, and I start at the top and move down to the bottom. And all this talk about seam allowances and we have this half inch that we're working with here, and I'm actually gonna sew this at about three eighths. And you can see, I'm not catching the serger stitches with my stitching, I'm just going right inside. You can use that as a guide, and that's gonna just continue to give yourself that little bit of ease that you need, and that's how easy it is. You just do all six panels and then you have your skirt. So now we are going to deal with the waistband, and there are a couple of different things you can do for your waistband. See how cute! You can do an elastic waistband with an elastic casing and what you want to be sure to recognize when you're doing that is when you fold this over, which you would wanna do maybe a quarter inch and then another half inch fold for that casing, and you can see, let me turn this wrong side out so you can actually see, that once you fold this, and you wanna make sure to press all of your seams open flat. So everything's lying flat, you'll have a flat waistband, flat hem. So pretend that I've done that already, and you can see that once you fold this over, your seam here is a little bit off from your seam down here because you're going from something narrow to something wider. So what you're gonna do when you sew your casing is kind of ease it in through the machine so that these seams end up matching, okay? So it's actually going to gather slightly as you're sewing, just ever so slightly, which is fine because once you insert your elastic, the whole thing's going to gather up anyway. But you just wanna make sure you're doing that, otherwise you're gonna get to the end and you're gonna have this really stretchy piece that doesn't fit, and it's gonna wanna pucker. So if you just take into account that while you're starting the casing, you're fine. But another great thing you can do is use fold-over elastic, and fold-over elastic is traditionally used in a knit skirt, where you're working with something stretchy, and then you're putting this fold-over elastic over it to go along with the stretch. But I find that it works really great for a woven skirt also. And fold-over elastic comes in a bunch of different colors, you can find it everywhere. This particular type is actually made for baby diapers, so it is the most comfortable thing that you will wear on your waist, and it just makes for the most comfortable skirt, so that's what I'm gonna work with right here, and you can see it comes in different widths also. I like to choose the widest width I possibly can because you're gonna zigzag this on here and you just, if you're working with something that is this thin, you can see it's gonna be a little hard to deal with under the presser foot. So once you make this skirt 500 times, then you can go with something a little more narrow and a little more decorative. So what we're gonna do, and I just put the elastic around the child's waist, since we're working with a child's skirt, and so it's snug but still comfortable. And then you're gonna cut that off and position it along the center back of the skirt. And this has a matte side and a shiny side, this one's the matte side, and you can choose whichever side you like. This is gonna be more comfortable on the skin, the matte side, so that's what I'm gonna use for this. And you're just gonna start with this end under the presser foot, and once I get this secured, I'll move this over. And you can certainly pin that part if your sewing machine isn't right next to you. Just pin the starting point, don't pin the whole thing. There's no sense in doing that. And lower the needle. Oh, first off, I need to switch to a zigzag stitch. Lower the needle, and you just wanna make sure that your stitches are going to hit the elastic and that your fabric is sandwiched in between. So if you just match this edge of the fabric with the center of the elastic, where there's a natural fold, and just start sewing. Now, what I like to do is go from seam to seam and then stop and readjust, and it's just the easiest way to do it. And you want to stretch the elastic as you sew, match up your other seam, give it a go. And I'm always putting my needle back in the down position or some machines have a feature where you can tell it to always stop with the needle down, and that's a time saver. Just keep going from seam to seam, and this is where you can fudge it a little bit too. If you get to the very end and you have excess elastic or you notice as you're going through that you're not gonna have enough because you haven't stretched it enough as you've been sewing, you can kind of adjust as you go and stretch it more along one panel than the other. It's very forgiving. But this gives it a nice finished edge, you don't have to deal with a casing and you don't have to deal with a zipper, and you're probably going to wear a shirt over the top of this, so the upper edge isn't going to show. So here I have a little bit left over, which is great. I want it to bypass the beginning, fold over and just sew right over that part where it meets. And I just back stitch a little to secure the threads and here you go. Super easy, super cute. Trim our threads. The only thing we have to do is hem and that's really up to you as well. I like to just do a simple double-turned hem, quarter inch, half inch. Again, it's gonna depend on where you want your skirt to fall. So now is a good time to try it on and make sure that you have, make sure that it is long enough. If it is a little bit too short for your liking and you can't accommodate a hem, you could always add a fabric strip. That would be a super cute accent. A happy accident, we will call it. Or you can choose this time to cut it off and make a shorter skirt, something that hits just below the knee or however you like it. So I would just do a simple double-turned hem and straight stitch it on the machine, and then your skirt is done.
I can make a strip skirt. Can you show how to make a Mermaid dress?
Just read the comments on this video. As I am a beginner at sewing, some measurements seem to be missing. How do you REALLY get correct measurements to make your own pattern? I really want to do this.
How would you make a tie waste? What I mean is; I don't want to use elastic but I want to be able to tie the skirt in the front. Do you fold the top over and thread a tie thru the top? Not sure how go about it.
Oh dear, these instructions are poor on so many counts! As already discussed it is the hip measurement you should start with, also just stretching your elastic as you sew will give an unprofessional and obviously homemade result - it should have been marked at the quarter points and pinned onto the skirt at each quarter of the waist measurement. Would anyone really want to wear such a thrown together garment as this would turn out to be!?
I can't understand how this video is still available when so many have commented that this skirt is not usable for a grown up woman... (And I can't understand why I watched the full video when it started with a ninja drawing of the pattern, no lining up the center or anything...guess I was hoping the zipper would come eventually, but sadly no...)
If making and elastic-waist skirt for someone who actually has hips, you should use the HIP measurement for the top of the gore or you won't be able to pull it on. Or plan to put in a zipper and waistband. Instead of trying to turn down a casing for elastic you can use wide bias tape to make the casing. If using fold-over elastic (Or wide elastic as a band) you should still divide and pin the elastic to the skirt so that the gathers will be fairly even. Beginning seamstresses (and who started that awful word "sewers" anyway?!) probably can't guess how much to stretch the elastic while sewing to make the gathers even and the elastic match up. I think you should encourage the use of pins for beginners; as they improve their skills they can go without if they wish. I've had too many seams slip to go without pins on anything I want to look nice.
Sorry that your instructions are incorrect. You should be measuring your hips, not your waist as the base measurement. If you are a beginner sewer, you are not instructed about cutting, grain of fabric, and reason for your sewing. Very disappointed in your instructions to give to my young teenage Granddaughter who wants to learn to sew.
The instructions for this skirt leaves vital steps out like hip measurement which is really important along with the grain line down the centre of the pattern. Measure out from the centre grain line (which is the length of the skirt) half the gore width plus ease plus seam allowance and if the gore width at the waist just fits the waist when finished then a zipper should be inserted. A seam and hem allowance must be added to the waist and hem before cutting out pattern depending on the desired waist finish. Test pattern in calico or cheap fabric before making in your real fabric. It is also helpful to cut the required gore patterns out of paper so that you can lay your patterns out economically not waisting fabric. In a nutshell this video should be redone with no steps missing as a beginner would be very disappointed with the result they got from following these instructions.
This is a very simple project, thus appropriate for beginners. However, the instructions given are some of the worst I've ever seen, thereby ensuring an unsatisfactory result for any beginner. BIG DISAPPOINTMENT!
I'm wondering how you would get this skirt on! As long as your hips are not too much bigger than your waist it will be fine and stretch enough. But if you are pear-shaped there is no way a skirt with a waist, even when stretched, which is only 2-3 inches bigger than your waist will go over your hips; and I doubt you would be able to get it on from the top over your shoulders. For most people this skirt really needs a zip, or for the top (waist) to be made quite a bit wider. Also, Ellen suggests putting a strip around the bottom of the skirt if you have made it too short. This is much more easily said than done. A straight strip would not work as it would not lie properly - it would need to be curved (the hem of the skirt should be trimmed slightly to make a smooth curve rather than six straight lines) to match the curve of the hem; or you could cut six pieces using the pattern and matching the bottom width of each pattern piece to the width of the top of the additional piece and continue the widening to the bottom of the new pieces.