I'm looking for bottoms-only, tight-fitting, straight-lined (read: wraparound), ~calf-length skirts in solid colors.

In my search for period-appropriate dress for my 18th Century Native American Sims, I've found that separate outfit parts seem to be the way to go... I'm not a mesher, and nobody who is will have made the outfits that I need - it's too strange of a combination. So I mix and match.

For European women of the period, you can probably picture the fancy dresses worn at Versailles, with the big skirts. The indigenous women here, when they adopted European clothing, adopted men's shirts, first and foremost, and their skirts were cut to fit under those shirts. See the photo of my friends Chris and Lorelei, from a 1998 trip to France that we took, to tour the old forts on the Atlantic coast. Their skirts are made from wool trade cloth, and decorated with ribbons and trade silver. In colder weather, short leggings made of the same wool could be worn under the skirts. Since outfit bottoms usually come with shoes, they'd have to be of the simple variety, to fit under (be hidden by) the "Low Boot" accessory mesh that I use in place of moccasins, for my Native Sims' footwear. A you can see, there's not much of the skirt even showing (the shirts were long, for reasons I won't go into here), so the design and color are a minor concern. The main thing is for skirts to be tight enough not to clip through the long-tailed 18th-century shirts that I use, from Almighty Hat.

Do you have a link to the tops you're using? Otherwise it's hard to tell what might fit under them.

Are you looking for skirts similar to this? Or this?

I'll try to find a link for the shirt... it was either from Almighty Hat, or Heget.
The first skirt mesh you have there is pretty close to what I want, as long as it could be in one of the basic colors: red and navy blue were predominant.

I believe it's Almighty Hat's top-only split shirt: there's several ages there. It's not quite the correct collar type, but it's top-only, which is key for using it with a skirt-only bottom.

The first skirt mesh is from Skell, here.

Original AF https://www.medievalsims.com/forums...hp?f=225&t=5646
CF and recolours https://www.medievalsims.com/forums...&p=63413#p63413
TF https://www.medievalsims.com/forums...hp?f=224&t=6171

I looked at those, because I looked at everything on PBK tagged "skirt". They don't look like the one in your first bodyshop screenshot - the hems are raggedy.

Coincidentally, I think the original mesh of my shirts was a Skell one, recolored by Hat.

Skellington's skirt mesh isn't ragged itself. She used an editable alpha layer to produce the ragged effect. It's 2:30 in the morning in Scotland so I'm not going to try to do anything with it just now but I'll try to look at it tomorrow.

I'm pretty sure Charity could make you nice non-ragged red and navy blue recolours of it if you ask her very nicely. It looks like she's already done a beige/brown one. (Maybe you should ask her in a PM, as we're not supposed to do requests in the forum!)

Ah, gotcha! I know next to nothing about meshing, and I wondered whether it'd be something like that. And then when I downloaded it, the mesh was actually called "ragged"... so you see my confusion. Thanks for the explanation.

I basically hacked the ragged bit off by changing the alpha, so you could get the idea of it. I did brown because western movies have taught me that those are the right colours lol. The other dress I showed you was an edit as well.

I wasn't going to bother doing any more in case they weren't what you wanted, but I can fix them so they don't clip with the long tops (the non fat morph does, slightly) and try and make them a bit longer, as I just hacked off the longer bit with the jagged edge. The recolours already come in red and blue.

I tried unsuccessfully to locate stills from my long-ago History Channel experience - where there were a good handful of women wearing these skirts - but here are three other examples.

My friend Beckie modeling a simple stroud-cloth skirt, utilizing the white stripe - where the clamp was attached at the cloth dyer's workshop in England - as the lone decoration:


A painting by Robert Griffing (who uses re-enactors as his models). There's even less of the skirt showing on this little girl than there would be on an adult:


Charles Bird King's 1827 portrait of Tshusick, an Ojibwa confidence trickster who notoriously bilked a large number of Washington A-Listers out of cash and gifts, including the First Lady. More of an embellished look, but possibly some artistic license happening as well.


Anyhow, mostly variations on the basic design, some just more decorated than others.

Sorry @Charity if I kind of dropped you in it, volunteering you to make these, but, looking at your post #2 above, I felt you had already made a start! And it has to be said you're much better at clothes recolours than I am. Most of the time I'm just doing alpha edits to make them skimpier and more revealing!

I'm fascinated to know where you got the skirt texture for the Sim on the left in post #2. I can't find any plain colours for adults. Did you just use one of skell's teen textures? (I know you can use a teen texture with an adult mesh ,provided that the meshes are equivalent. My one and only item shared on Pumbbob Keep, an Adult conversion of ladylarkrune's male teen loincloths, simply uses ladylarkrune's textures unaltered with tiggerypum's adult loincloth mesh, also unaltered.)

They're in the link that says 'CF and recolours'.

Alright, what do you think of this?

Looks really great to me! I can't tell you how much I've been looking forward to this. My Sims have been running around in just the shirts, which - especially in the snow - makes me shiver just to look at them.

Would barefoot be possible? I have an accessory shoe...

It is barefoot. I just stuck my accessory Roman Sandals on it (which I made after you were looking for Roman era shoes, IIRC XD).

Just got a few things to finish up.

I mean, they are good-looking sandals...

Okay, I got far too interested in messing around with this, but I now only have an alpha bit to fix. Sorry for the wait.

Here are a couple of pictures. I tried putting some stripes on the bottom as in some of your pictures and I also tried my hand at putting boots on the mesh for colder climates.

Definitely worth the wait; I love the stripes! One of the fabrics most re-enactors of the period are familiar with is called Stroud cloth, after the river valley in England where the stuff was produced. It's densely woven, but from fairly fine wool yarn. The mordant properties of the water in the river Stroud made for a very colorfast dye job, and typically it would have a white stripe along the edges, from where the clamps were applied during the dip. The two colors most often mentioned in period trade lists are cochineal red, and very dark blue, although modern reproductions are also found in green and yellow. The black one with the white stripe at the bottom is very reminiscent of that cloth:

Oh cool. I had copied the colours the women in your photos were wearing. Red skirt with gold, blue skirt with red and black skirt with white (actually, looking closer that's blue too). If the black with white skirt that I made is the right width for the stripe then which colours for skirt/stripe would you prefer?

Yes, it's a good stripe width for that type of cloth, which would be either red, or dark blue (which does look a lot like black), both with a single white stripe where the clamp had kept the fabric from being dyed.

Other colored stripes would indicate sewn-on ribbon decoration: red, gold, light blue, green even - actually, any bright color that was possible to produce in the 18th Century (I've attached a Heget color swatch). Ribbon width was likely not too crazy; probably about the same as the resist-stripes, maybe wider... 1-2 inches; whatever is easiest. And for those, you could even do multiple stripes, multiple colors, depending on how fancy you felt like making it... but I would say use the same color backgrounds: red and navy blue, possibly black. Other color wool was produced, of course, but these seem to be the most pervasive ones in historic North American trade lists. We see white cloth being sold also, but my instinct tells me they weren't using it to make "bottoms" clothing... gets dirty too easily.



Re: the boots - while those would make sense as cold-weather wear from a European standpoint, for Native Americans they weren't really a thing... if they just covered the legs and not the feet, that would be the look of wool leggings, which were worn by both men & women, with leather moccasins.

Again, this is all from a fairly specific timeframe: 1700s, and east of the Mississippi. Out west, and way north, away from French & English trade goods, pretty much all the clothing was still being made from animal skins. Tall boots were worn, especially up in Canada, but they would have been from elkhide, sealskin, things like that; therefore "natural" leather colors.

Probably way more than you wanted to know; I know I tend to ramble on. And thank you again for doing this... it's heroic, groundbreaking work in the field of historic Simming!

This just popped up on a friend's Facebook feed yesterday, from an event in Alabama. She's got her skirt hem flipped up to make it easier to sit like that (for finger-weaving purposes), but you can see what cloth it's made from.

I've actually finished the skirts, but they clip with the shirts and so far I can't fix it.

Do you want me to just upload them as is, or see if I figure out how to fix the bones (I've never figured out bones before)?

Just see if you can figure out the bones, if you're having fun doing it; there's no hurry.

I hate bones lol.