Vintage Inspired Black Wool ¾ Circle Skirt

I’ve found it so easy to make wool circle skirts to fill out my wardrobe with warm, vintage inspired styles. I started with the brown wool ¾ circle skirt I posted about in 2017. Last year, I posted about the burgundy wool ½ circle skirt I made. In between those, in the first months of 2019, I decided to add a black ¾ circle skirt. It’s a great basic!

It really is basic: a ¾ circle skirt with side seams and a center back seam.

I used 1 ¾ yards of 60″ wide wool, a scrap of interfacing, thread, a zipper, and a few yards of hug snug for the hem. The total materials cost was about $33.

The side seams allowed for the easy addition of pockets! Here are my pockets ready to be set in. They’re made from the black wool and have serged seam allowances to keep everything tidy.

The main circle part of the skirt is set into a basic rectangle waistband. The waistband is interfaced with a strip of upholstery canvas to keep it from crumpling while being worn. Because my wool fabric is opaque I used this random geometric scrap for the interfacing.

The waistband closes at the back with a button and buttonhole above a lapped zipper. The geometric interfacing was showing when I cut my buttonhole open (top photo, below), which just wouldn’t do! To fix it, I used a black sharpie to darken the white threads that were showing (bottom photo, below). It worked like a charm!

Here’s a back view of the skirt. You can see the zipper lap and also just barely see a pocket opening on the right side.

This skirt is mostly machine sewn with the edges finished with a serger. The waistband is finished by hand. The hem is faced with black hug snug sewn by machine and then hemmed by hand for an invisible finish.

I’ve been wearing this for well over a year, but hadn’t yet found a moment to take photos. This day was perfect, as I was also documenting the completion of my sweater (a post on that will be forthcoming!). Plus, we had the most magical snowy winter woods to take these photos. It felt like Narnia!