Am I measuring myself wrong?
I am, according to BMI, just on the border between overweight and normal. I gave birth 5 months ago so I’m okay with it for now. However, I wanted to attempt to make myself a skirt and bought a pattern. This pattern is putting me in the plus sizes at size 22 or 24. I’ve never needed to shop in plus sizes…I wear Medium shirts (thank you, breastfeeding) and size 8-10 pants. I’m not even on the chart. It’s not a Junior’s pattern. I’m measuring my waist at 36″ and my hips at 40″. I even looked online to make sure I was measuring myself right, and it looks like I am. Am I really in “plus” sizes? Am I doing something wrong? Or is 36″ waist really that huge?
Buy hip-fitting skirt and pants patterns by hip size, not waist — so you need a size 16 misses pattern (don’t worry, pattern sizes are always larger than ready to wear sizes). You’ll “buy” the extra 6″ needed at the waist by straightening the side seam from waist to hip and making the front darts (most likely) smaller, or possibly even eliminating them.
If your skirt pattern is for a skirt that’s designed to be loose at the hip (e.g., gored or dirndl), then you can just use the pattern sized for the waist and deal with the extra fabric in the hip.
Make sure your tape measure is over the appropriate undergarments and parallel to the floor, not tilted up or down, which folks do rather commonly when trying to measure yourself.
You may find you now have a tilted waistline — tie a string around your middle and settle it where you want your waistband to sit. If the CF to floor measurement is now shorter than CB to floor, you’ve got a tilted waistband, and your skirt will tend to swing towards the back at the sideseam. The correct alteration will be to keep the grainline straight at the hip and remove part of the top of the skirt pattern.
If this doesn’t make sense, drop me a note and I’ll explain with some diagrams.
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