A while ago a friend gave me a really beautiful piece of silky material. I am guessing it is a polyester blend, but it flows like silk! I held onto it for a while, trying to decide what to make: a skirt? a chemise? pants? I ended up deciding to try out one of the endless free and easy diy patterns online for a kimono-style wrap…thing. Calling it a “kimono” just seems disrespectful to real kimonos!
The one I used was here: https://www.fabric.com/blog/easy-diy-fringed-kimono/
I did do french seams along the sides, but since I didn’t have any fringe, I finished the garment with a narrow hem around the whole thing.
Now here is where my comments and review come in. While it was a very *very* easy piece, it takes some math to tweak it.
I wanted longer sleeves. The mistake I made was that I didn’t take that little bit of extra sleeve length into account when I measured in the 10 inches from the sides to make the “T.” I should have gone in much deeper than 10 inches under the arms to compensate for that extra three and a half inches on each sleeve. Whoopsie.
If I were to do this again, I would go about it a little differently. Rather than go IN 10 inches from both of the edges of the piece, I will find the middle of the folded piece and measure OUT 10 inches on each side of that middle. This would make the “body” of the garment 20 inches wide – front and back – for a 40-inch circumference (which is closer to my measurements) REGARDLESS the sleeve length. Due to my oopsie, my garment has a 54 inch circumference =/
Another example: were I to make this for someone who was, say 46 inches around, I would round up to 50, divide that by 2 to get 25 for front and 25 for back and then divide again by 2 to get 12.5. I would then go 12.5 inches OUT from the median on each side for a “body” of 25 front and back to get that 50-inch circumference. Hopefully I am being clear here.
The advantage of going from the middle out would mean the sleeves could be as long or short as you’d like without affecting how the body fits.
In the end, I made a sash and that pulls the piece together on my frame so it still works, but for next time I think I will go for a slimmer version.
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