@stiklief circle swimsuit

This swimsuit! The pattern cutting has been stuck in my brain since @stiklief posted it to their stories (in a highlight now, goooooo check it out). At the time, I did a little paper suit to work it out. Then when I had a glorious beginning of july sewing rush of projects, this was very much in the mix.

The fabric is from ye olde garage sale that was a basement and garage full floor to ceiling of fabrics. It wasn’t even one of the things I was going to take home, but over the course of exploring the basement I’d palled up with a couple older quilters, who as we were having our yardage measured up insisted I buy some of this print for a swimsuit. At roughly a dollar an armspan, I couldn’t rightly tell them no.

In the making of this suit, I would recommend measuring your own body length to determine what you’ll need. I didn’t do this, in part because I was thinking oh, there’s stretch, it’ll be too complicated. That’s silly! As usual, I’ll have my relevant measurements at the end of this post, including body length. I will also rampantly mix imperial and metric measurements throughout this post (emotionally, I’m for metric, but practically, my tools are more frequently marked in imperial). I’m also including photos of the original cutting layed out on my mat for some semblance of more detailed measurements, if one is willing to do some interpretation.

I cut this at 80* 150 cm; ultimately, I think it should have been a maximum of 80*99 cm, and my back still has gaping. Swayback issues anyone?

To determine sizes for the circles, I leaned heavily on my paper model to figure out how the circles would fall on my body. Ultimately, I worked with an 11” diameter as default. That is roughly right for my legs, though ultimately the circles on the sides of my body were shortened by a whopping 5”. I’ll have some thinking to do about optimization if I try this out again, which I think is reasonably likely as it could work well as a training suit.

You can see that the arm hole circle fragment and back quarter circle cuts are more like a 4” radius, but I did need to lengthen the arm holes a bit, I’ve lost the scraps but I think it was by about 2cm. You can see in fit pictures that this works well for the arm, but I’ve got a bit of excess happening at the back neck. It’s certainly not ruinous, but I probably need to connect the back neck such that I take out a bit more there.

I altered construction from @stiklief’s instructions a bit, both in order of operations and in favour of attaching swimsuit elastic at all the edges much as in the Spring Racer instructions. That is, I basted the pattern into desired shape then attached elastic to the wrong side, directly at the edge, then folded under and stitched again. The basting is done with a straight stitch and I didn’t bother removing it, so it pops a bit as I wear it, but that’s not a problem. Both phases of elastic are added with a triple step zig zag, so the functional stretch comes from there and it looks quite clean, really.

close up of suit showing side circle cut out, zig zag stitch effect and back gaping

Coming to the aforementioned fit issues, the suit was just too long for me and I had to take out 5” at both front and back. Since the full length of the fabric is the lining and the body, this works out to a total of 20” removed vertically. It’s a touch tight at my hips, but I like the fit at the bust. There’s a four inch difference in my measurements between these, and I’ll take a too tight butt over a loose top, but I might add an inch or two of width then work with it on another try.

I’m also thinking that I might have to move away from the true circle pattern cutting to get the shaping I’d like to have at the leg, since the back leg cut is just a bit too in-between to be exactly to my taste. Or maybe I’ll just try evening out the circle sizes as needed for a shorter overall length and see where that lands me! I’m really not sure!

It’s also possible to try this cutting it as a lining and suit layer seperately, which wouldn’t be a huge change to how you cut the pattern. Plus, you could still use the leftover circles in the bikini bottoms, tho I suspect it would mess with the top design, if I understand how it goes together correctly.

Pattern: @Stiklief circle swimsuit
My measurements: 35 bust, 30 waist, 39 hips, torso circumference 59”
Size made: ultimately worked with a 80x99 cm rectangle
Fabric and notions: fabric garage sale swim of some description, swim elastic from Fabcycle