Ribbon skirt

I have long been dreaming about making a ribbon skirt after seeing the gorgeous creations of Lena Hoschek. These skirts take inspiration from Austrian folk costumes but the ribbons come all over the world and combine different cultures and traditions. However, these skirts don’t come cheaply! After sewing one, I understand the price and actually think that the price is a bargain! Still, I am always after a sewing challenge and this definitely was one!

The construction

First of all. I have never seen a Lena Hoschek skirt and I have no idea how they are actually made. I had to figure out the best way to make a ribbon skirt myself.

I decided on making a half circle skirt. This requires some math but it can’t be avoided. The circumference of a circle is 2πr, so for a half circle, the length of the arc is:

If your waist is w, then the radius of the waist edge s_w is:

Ok. The length of the first ribbon needs to be your waist plus the seam allowance to insert the zipper. For me I added 3 cm extra or the zipper. My waist is 80 cm, so my first ribbon was 83 cm long. We can just add the seam allowance to the waist length and think that w = 83 cm.

Now, the skirt needs to flare out, so we need to make each ribbon a little bit longer than the previous one. Here comes the important math. Each ribbon increases the skirt length with the amount of s_r. This is about 2-3 mm less than the width of the ribbon due to the seam allowance. So, if your ribbon is 2 cm wide, s_r is 1.8 cm. Let’s take a random ribbon with the length of l:

The length of the next ribbon is

So, the length of each ribbon is the length of the previous ribbon plus π times the ribbon width minus the tiny seam allowance. To make matters even simpler, you can easily estimate π ≈ 3. This means that the skirt will be slightly less flaring than a half circle but the difference is small.

The materials and preparation

I asked advice from my sewing guru M, who had experimented with a ribbon skirt and found out that regular satin ribbon was too delicate for a project like this. So, I settled on collecting all kinds of taffeta, jacquard, grosgrain and velvet ribbons that suited my colour scheme of dark green and black. Some ribbons I already had and others I bought online, mostly from Karnaluks in Estonia. A word of warning: the amount of ribbons needed doesn’t come cheap! I think this skirt has over 100 € worth of ribbons!

The upper ribbons need to be narrow (1-1.5 cm) to curve nicely around the waist. For them, 1 m pieces are long enough. The ribbons closer to the hem need to be up to 3 m long, even longer. To be sure that I had enough ribbon for each layer, I laid them on the floor in an approximation of the skirt.

The ribbons I ended up with were a mixture of polyester and cotton. I didn’t realise this but it would have been good to wash the cotton ribbons in hot water to prevent them from shrinking later. I did steam them, so I hope that was enough! (Btw. The only ribbon that was prone to wrinkling was the cotton herringbone ribbon, so I recommend using something other than that.)

Sewing the ribbon skirt

Sewing narrow ribbons with 2 mm seam allowance sounded challenging. On a whim, I decided to test, if the antique Singer edge stitcher foot would work with my Bernina with an adapter. I was surprised that it actually fitted! With this foot, you can thread the ribbons trough the slots in the foot and the foot takes care of the narrow seam allowance. In the places where the longer ribbon showed signs of puckering, I used a pin to feed more of it under the presser foot and I ended up with a smooth result!

Each layer needs to be eased to the previous one carefully. I started by steam pressing the ribbons on a curve. Some ribbons collaborated nicely, others stayed straight no matter what I did. However, measure and cut ribbons only after steaming them and measure the long edge! Then you can start attaching them.With most ribbons, just pinning carefully worked just fine but a few needed actual gathering stitches sewn.

I sewed each ribbon on, pressed the seam and so on until I reached the length I wanted.

Making the waistband

The waistband is made out of a wide velvet ribbon and a grosgrain ribbon. I first stitched them together at the upper edge with a minimal seam allowance.

Then I attached the waist band to the skirt:

I added an invisible zipper to the vertical seam. This took a few tries to align each of the ribbon stripes perfectly but it was worth the effort!

Lining

I cut the lining by drawing the half circle skirt pattern onto my lining fabric and cutting it out. I pinned the lining to the wrong side of the waistband (the grossgrain ribbon) and sewed it on. Then I folded the grosgrain ribbon to the wrong side and stitched along the the same seam that I used to attach the right side of the waistband, now attaching the wrong side and the lining as well. The zipper edge of the lining and the waistband was hard to sew with a machine, so I did it by hand. I also made a little button tab out of a piece of jacquard ribbon.

I then left the skirt to hang overnight before trimming and hemming the lining.

After hemming I tried wearing the skirt and noticed that the lowest ribbon was scratchy and stuck to my tights. The lining was not enough to prevent this properly, so I attached a wide satin ribbon to the hem to smooth out the scratchiness. I also added a tiny cotton lace to decorate the hem.

The finished ribbon skirt

It took me almost a week to sew this skirt. Just sewing the ribbons together took 4 days! However, I’m super happy with the finished skirt. The half circle skirt flares out nicely with no need for a petticoat. I took advantage of a rare sunny December day and snapped a few pics in my frozen garden.

The side view:

… and the back:

The skirt looks nice with a blouse, with a knit sweater or when combined with my red jacket I made a few years ago.

One other thing about this skirt: it doesn’t wrinkle! This might just be a perfect travelling skirt!

Thank you for reading this long post. Subscribe to my blog so that you don’t miss the next post! See you soon and happy sewing!

Katja