"Where did you find grape patterned corduroy?"

High-waisted shorts seem to be pretty controversial. I've seen a number of strong opinions against them, but also ones saying they're super hot. I'm on the "these are hot" side of things, as long as you wear them in the proper size. Squeezing into anything that's way too small for you is unflattering and I'm not sure why so many ladies insist on doing it. This is only slightly relevant.

I got this pretty corduroy with bows and flowers on it a couple weeks ago and decided to make some shorts. I wish it was softer, but it works.

I've decided to start doing tutorials. First up: wtf are culottes anyways?

I mean, this is a tutorial for culottes? a skort? A split-skirt. That's probably most accurate.

According to internet sources (aka Wikipedia) culottes are any women's garment that looks like a skirt but is pants. They used to be a men's garment kind of like knickerbockers. (I just wanted to use the word knickerbockers.) It seems much more accurate to call the women's version a split skirt.

Someone linked me to a pattern for some culottes made to look like a circle skirt a while ago, but I can't justify buying a pattern for something I can easily do, even if I rarely have the motivation to draft these things. I convinced myself this time around by deciding to do a tutorial as I went along, and here it is!

"They're like shorts, with a skirt over them." "You mean a skort?"

Oh, yea, I guess I do.

I saw these photos a few weeks ago and felt inspired to make some wide leg shorts. I toyed with the idea for a while without doing anything, but then got an email from fabric.com with this free pattern for "tap pants." How convenient!

I made mine out of a stretchy knit fabric for comfort. While I was at the fabric store, I decided to do a chiffon overlay (because they had knit and chiffon fabric with the same prints). I wish the chiffon was a little more translucent, but it's not a big deal.

I did a wide elastic waistband because the fabric wasn't quite stretchy enough on it's own.

Probably the most significant part of this project is that I finally convinced myself to do a chiffon hem the proper way. Usually I don't care and just do a narrow machine hem because it seems like too much effort to do the super narrow rolled hem, but this seemed like a good time to learn. I used this tutorial (the "by machine without a rolled hem foot" part). It's so easy! I'm kind of disappointed in myself for not doing this earlier. Though, I assume it's harder on curved edges or with super long hems like on circle skirts. I do have a rolled hem foot for my machine, but it's always a lot of hassle to get working right. This gave a very neat result.

You can't really tell these are shorts just looking at them, but the point is that they don't fly up in the wind like a skirt would. Sweet.