The cotton plant and how I hand-sewed a circle skirt

When one really considers where the materials in our everyday life come from, a greater appreciation for the organisms and processes involved can develop. The threads in my cotton clothing, towels, sheets and the circle skirt I just sewed, for instance, came from plants that produce little fluff balls which humans have used and cherished for thousands of years.

The Cotton Plant

Cotton is a non-man-made fiber that comes from plants of the genus Gossypium. All species of Gossypium, including wild varieties and those that we domesticated and now cultivate for fabric, likely have a common ancestor originating 5-10 million years ago on the African continent.¹ With seeds travelling across oceans, also millions of years ago, they became native to Asia, Australia and the Americas as well.

Some of the earliest evidence of humans using cotton comes from a Neolithic burial site in Pakistan dating to the 6th millennium BC where copper beads were found threaded with cotton fiber.² Scientists are not sure if the cotton fibers came from a domesticated or wild species.

Today the most common commercial species of cotton are domesticated species G. hirsutum and G. barbadense, from the Americas, and G. arboreum and G. herbaceum from Africa/Asia. The American species, G. hirsutum (used for 90% of today’s world cotton production) and G. barbadense are both thought to be first domesticated in Mesoamerica thousands of years ago.³

At the time they are picked, cotton fibers are mainly made of cellulose, which is a carbohydrate (glucose) polymer.⁴ These polymers are essentially cell walls that grow and extend out from the cotton plant seed.^5,6 When the cotton fiber cell has died and dried out, humans come along and pick the cotton fiber to either spin into thread or weave into fabric. The seeds are also collected for it’s oil.

Some of the reasons why cotton is valued is for its absorbency, strength, breathability, softness and organic (as in from an organism) nature (it’s part of a plant so it breaks down into molecules that can be used by other organisms instead of into things like microplastics).

The Circle Skirt

I spotted a piece of cotton fabric and because I liked the print and colour so much I bought it with no particular project in mind. Despite imagining all sorts of potential creations, I thought a project with a simple pattern like the “circle” skirt would be best since I am still learning how to sew.

To keep it simple, the skirt is just made from two pieces of fabric: the skirt body and the waistband.

The skirt body is a circle with a hole in the center (a donut). To cut this donut a little bit of math is necessary, but it is super simple:

C = 2 x π x R.

C represents the circumferance of a circle, π is the number 3.14 (roughly) and R is the radius of the circle.

Then all that was needed was two measurements: the waist measurement and the length of the skirt from the waist. The waist measurement plus 4cm for seam allowance becomes C in the equation (adding a few cm to the actual waist measurement to allow for some movement is probably a good idea too):

65cm + 4cm = 2 x π x R.

R is now the unknown, so let’s rearrange the equation:

69cm/(2 x π) = R.

69cm/(6.28) = R.

R = 11cm.

Ok, what did we do with this number? The material was folded in half and then half again.

The corner of the folded material that represents the center of the fabric when unfolded, is where the R was measured from.

Once the sewing lines (dotted black lines on the diagram) were marked, I cut a few centimeters outside of the lines to include the seam allowance.

After opening the material out, I cut down one of the fold lines so that it was an open donut shape. This seam becomes the side of the skirt where the invisible zip goes.

I attached the waistband with a backstitch (and a slip stitch to pin it down on the inside). I didn’t sew it up at the ends until I secured the invisible zip on however (so much better than trying to make a normal zip invisible like on my first skirt!). Seams were finished by folding them over twice, ironing them flat and fell stitching them down.

For a final touch, I used some cotton lace that I had to decorate the bottom of the skirt.

The lace was pinned down and then secured with a running backstitch along both edges.

The finished circle skirt!

References