Petticoat Practice

I found an excellent tutorial on making a tiered petticoat at The AntiCraft, and decided to use some cheap ($3 a yard) cotton eyelet fabric to practice.

I had six yards of the fabric, which was good because the bottom tier of the petticoat had to be cut from the decorative-hemmed bottom of the cloth and I needed six yards of that. Yes, six yards around the bottom of this piece. The middle tier is three yards around, the top tier is a yard and a half around at the bottom.

How does this work, you ask? Ruffles! Not the kind you eat with dip, unfortunately, but the kind that take for-freaking-ever to make, especially when your cat comes in halfway through smelling of skunk (a bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a quarter cup of baking soda, and a spoonful of dishwashing liquid, mix it up and wash your cat with it, it works like a charm, rinse with warm water and dry your cat as thoroughly as you can with towels because cats get cold really easily).

Basically, to make a ruffle you baste the top edge of the cloth piece loosely--I have to do this by hand since my sewing machine only does the one stitch. Then you pin the upper edges of the cloth to be ruffled to the bottom edge of the middle tier piece, pull on the basting thread so that the cloth bunches up, and distribute the ruffled bunches evenly and pin them in place. See in the picture below how nice and even the ruffles in the nearer half of the piece are compared to the farther half? I'd just finished the first half and hadn't started on the second.

Then you sew the pieces together. Now, if you're me and you're sloppy and you weren't thinking it through (maybe because you were distracted by a skunky cat), you pinned the cloth wrong so that there's a raw edge on the outside as well as the inside. It's okay, though. This is practice and no one should see anything but a glimpse of ruffle of a petticoat anyway.

Once that step is done, you get to do it again.

And finally, it's finished. And it doesn't look half-bad, although the tension seems to have already messed up on my sewing machine. Sewing machines are a mixed blessing: on the one hand, it took me hardly any time to actually sew the seams of this project (the ruffling took forever, but it always does); on the other hand, when a sewing machine's tension starts messing up, in my admittedly limited experience there is nothing you can do to fix it and the machine eventually becomes unusable.