I finished making the changes to make the skirt side seams straight. It basically extends out the line from the waist side to the highhip or hip, whichever gives a wider flare to make sure it is wide enough. I’m not sure that is ideal, but it seams to work pretty well. This combined with the front and back darts (each of which is independently sized) makes it close around the waist to highhip area and then basically drop straight down past the hips (assuming 0 flare is added in the style variables).
The basic design seems solid, however there is the issue of how to close it at the back. The idea is to use a zipper which has a length computed based on the difference between the waist and hip measurements to allow it to fit over the hips when you pull it up. I think this will work, but someone should maybe double check the math on that.
Currently the zipper length is given as:
- max(hip_circ; highhip_circ) - waist_circ + 1.5 inch
Also, it might be nice to have a variant which snaps/hooks/buttons at the top hem, and if so, then there should probably be an additional flap of fabric to cross from one side to the other to engage with the button and/or to cover the open area that the zipper would be closing. I need to think a bit more about how to do that, basically should be like the flap on the front of a pair of jeans, but I haven’t figured out how to do that on the pattern yet. If someone wants to figure that out that would be cool.
Lastly, there should probably be some slight tweaks to the front/back allocation of the top and bottom of the side seam. For someone with very different front/back arcs at the different heights (waist, highhip, and hip) it might lead to the side seam not running vertically. I need to think this through a bit. and maybe see some results from people with different body shapes to see how to deal with this issue.
Anyway, here is the pattern - use the same measurements file from a few posts above.
Skirt - A-Line Straight Seam.val (19.6 KB)