Reversible Hoodie

Yet another review, this time for my son’s reversible hoodie. My poor friends who regularly check out my “regular” blog must thing that all I do these days is sew. I’ve been quite busy with sewing lately, though, and it seems that I never get a chance to stop and document stuff. But to that end, I’ve got stuff that I’ve sewn over the past few years that never got uploaded. I’m looking at forking out the $25 for an upgraded membership over at Flickr because my photo bank has run waaaaay over the 200 limit they set for the freebie account. Will have to do that when I get some money, though, so it’ll be a while. In the meantime, I’m hoping to get images and reviews uploaded to Pattern Review before they disappear into the nether regions of Flickr.

It’s Bear-able

As promised, another review, this time for the bear jacket. Now off to enjoy some Lonesome Dove with my honey!

Ta-Da!

Ok, I’m going to cop out and post a link to my review for the New Look dress since I spent so much time typing it over at Pattern Review and I’m too lazy to cut and paste and remove all the tags over here. Which strikes me funny, since I know that anyone reading my regular blog got here by a link, too. So, Harrison and Laura Files readers, sorry about the multiple jumps here, but I’ll throw in a few pictures here to make the extra jumps sting less. :)

I am aware, btw, that her dress is a little big. Her birthday is in about six weeks so I anticipate that it will probably fit just about perfectly at that point. Honestly, though, I’m just so excited that I have it done this early, I wouldn’t care if it were two sizes too big.

I’m also posting pictures of the kids in their respective jackets that I’ve made in the past month or so. I so suck at documenting anything like this. Sigh. I’ll have reviews up for them at PR pretty soon, too, hopefully. Perhaps that’s what my posts will be for the next few nights? Maybe? Unless something cool happens around here, that’s sounding like a pretty good plan. I mean, we’re planning on watching the Space Station fly over us the next few nights, but otherwise it’s a quiet weekend planned at our Nut House.

So, without further ado, the cuteness:

  

 

 

Painless Ruffles

Feeling muchly geniusish tonight. I know I must have read this tip for taming gathers somewhere before—I’m pretty certain it didn’t just appear in my head, but even just remembering it and utilizing it is pretty darned smart.

So the problem with gathering, as anyone who sews can tell you, is that you go to all the trouble to get the gathers all nice and even, spreading them equally around the garment (in this case, a dress!), and when you go to do the actual stitching on them to anchor them in place they wiggle and woggle around on you. You end up with a skirt that is really poofy on one side and somewhat flat on the other.

Kind of takes the fun out of making a big poofy, twirly skirt.

What happens (for me, anyway) is that when you feed the gathers through the sewing machine, the flat part is usually to the bottom with the feed dogs and the bumpy part is against the sewing foot. The foot presses down because that’s what feet do, and it tends to squash the gathers out of its way. At this point, I usually stop, grumble, re-configure the remaining gathering and start sewing again, hoping for the best. Which of course, never occurs.

So I got to thinking tonight while working on the ruffle gathering for the dress I’m making for Laura that I needed some way to make the gathered part as smooth as the ungathered part.

And that’s when inspiration struck.

I began by gathering the tulle for the underskirt in the way I would gather most anything—two lines of stitching, about 1/8th of an inch apart and pulling the threads until it was the right size. I evenly distributed the gathers and pinned them into place on the underskirt along a line I had marked.

 

I next took some tracing paper and cut it into evenish strips of about 13 inches (the width of the paper) by two inches (my cut size). I then centered the paper up over the stitching lines and started pinning it in place. After I got the first strip in place, I lined up my ruler with the stitching line on both sides of the paper and then drew the stitching line onto the strip. Each subsequent strip would be overlapped about an inch or two and I’d line the ruler up with the drawn line to the left and the stitching line to the right.

After the entire row of gathering was papered, I lined up my needle to sew directly on the drawn line.

 

I sewed the drawn line and for good measure, I moved about 1/8 inch toward the edge and sewed a second line.

 

My last step was to carefully remove the strips of paper from the stitching lines. I had used a fairly close stitch length and some pretty flimsy paper, but if either of those factors had been different, I could have easily squirted or blotted a little water along the thread which would have weakened it enough to come off without any ripping problems.  As it was, it came out really nicely and didn’t take too long to remove. My end product was a really nice ruffle that is evenly gathered.

 

Twirl time!

All told, this probably added about 20-30 minutes to the project, but the benefits of doing it add immeasurably to my happiness! I’ll be using this again when I attach the skirt to the bodice and pretty much anywhere else I think of adding ruffles!