A Handy Dandy Skirt Chart

This is a simple, handy little chart that may come in useful under a bizarre set of circumstances. Well, not all too bizarre. It's dandy if you're making skirts. I'm always figuring something out how many panels I need to make sure a skirt will actually go over a farthingale, or how many panels I need to make a support skirt that's, say, 28" wide. For some reason, I'm incapable of actually *remembering* this stuff.

So here we go. The three most common fabric widths are 27" (fine silks, and stuff), 45" (almost all normal clothing fabric), and 58" (the real measurement for fabric marked 60", including most upholstery fabrics). Personally, I find that I most commonly use 2-4 panels of fabric in a skirt. The Width of the Resulting Piece of fabric is figured using .5" seam allowances on all edges. The Resulting Diameter is the width (inside edge to edge, when the darn thing is being circular) of the Support skirt that could be covered with a skirt that size. (Assuming thin boning in the support skirt, and that you are making a closed skirt.) I rounded that one down to the nearest half inch.