How To- Wide Hem on a Circle Skirt

So I am making a circle skirt. I used the Linda pattern on Burdastyle. You can get yours here http://www.burdastyle.com/patterns/linda. For $2.50 it is a great pattern to have in your stash. This is my first time making the pattern so it is trial and error. This pattern however is extremely easy to make! I didn't make the lining and I considered underlining it but decided against it. So when it came time to hem the skirt I hit a road block. Hemming a circle skirt takes a little bit of know how. There are a few ways to do it and I had to decide How I was going to do it. I had my heart set on a wide hem. I decided on a 1 inch hem . This is particularly hard because of the fullness at the bottom of the skirt. There are other ways to hem a circle skirt. Gertie has a couple of videos up on you tube and on her blog about how to do a narrow hem on a circle skirt. I would say that this is the most common hem for a circle skirt because it avoids a lot of issues with the fullness when done the way that Gertie shows you. You can find her way here. http://www.blogforbettersewing.com/2010/01/hemming-circle-skirt-part-one.html and part 2 is there as well you just have to click on the link to it at the bottom of her post. The next way to hem a circle skirt is to face it. You make a facing using the bottom of the skirt pattern and face the hem of the skirt, simple. Then the next option is to bind your hem with bias tape, this can be packaged bias tape that matches your project or bias tape you made from the same project fabric. Now To achieve the wide hem on my skirt I had to ease the fullness by gathering the bottom of the skirt slightly, pressing, and then hemming. So this is a tutorial on what I did. I am happy with the results. This was my first time doing it so I'm sure that next time I will do it better. The results are not perfect but close enough for me! I hope this helps any of you who might need it.
So here is the skirt hanging on my dress form. You should let the skirt hang for a couple of days to allow the fabric to drop to it's final position. Then you mark your hem. There are a few ways to do this. I use the hem measuring tool on my dress form.

Then I took Gertie's advice and I marked my wall even with my measurement and I checked my measurement all the way around the bottom of the skirt to make sure I marked it correctly.

With my pins in the skirt and them hem all marked with the pins I took the skirt to my sewing machine.

I lowered the tension on my machine and increased my stitch length up to 5 which is the highest my machine will go. I then gathered around the whole bottom of the skirt. There is alot of fabric here so I suggest sewing your gathering stitches in 4 sections to make it easier to gather. You don't have to gather it tightly, just enough to ease in the fullness.

Then you will take the skirt to your ironing board for pressing.

Fold up your hem that you marked with your pins, and press. Remove your pins as you go and put them back in higher up to hold in the fullness that you gathered and pressed.

The very bottom edge of the pressed hem will be nice and smooth and the top of it ( which is the raw edge of your skirt ) will be slightly gathered.

Then take your skirt back to your machine and sew your hem. I increased my stitch length for this to 3 just to make thing run smoothly since there is extra fabric gathered on the inside. I hemmed from the wrong side of the skirt to keep an eye on keeping the eased fullness laying flat on my machine. I used the measurements on my machine to make sure that the hem was an inch deep all the way around. When I was done I pressed the hem again.

And this is the result that I got. Not too shabby! All in all it was an easy process. Easing in the fullness at the bottom of a circle skirt is similar to easing the fullness in a sleevecap. Just slight gathering and your home free.

Some more pics of the final result. I will put up pics of me in the skirt after I wear it this weekend.

I hope that this tutorial was clear and that it helps someone out there in the virtual home sewing world!!!!!!

Besos!