Tag: ruffles

New Old Cardigan

New Old Cardigan

This morning I rediscovered the gathering foot for my sewing machine, and combined it with Pretty Jane’s continuous bias tape tutorial.

Half a metre of fabric turned into around twelve metres of tape, which I then ran through the gathering foot. This resulted in about four and a half metres of pretty ruffled trim! It’s about 4cm wide, and I ran both long edges through the overlocker. This gives it a nice finish, and also a little extra wiggle as the bias edges stretch a bit.

New Old Cardigan

I wanted to use my lovely new ruffle straight away, so I decided to re-vamp a very old cardigan. My Mum knitted this for me many years ago (I might even have worn it to school!), and the cuffs had become very threadbare.

Once I’d chopped off the worst of the unravelling cuffs and run them through the overlocker, I simply zig-zagged a length of ruffle into place. That looked a bit silly on its own, so I added some matching buttons. Good, but still nowhere near ruffly enough, so I decided to go a bit mad and stitch the ruffled trim all the way around the neck. Much better!

I was looking at the bias tape tutorial because I have quite a lot of small pieces of fabric lying around in the Shed, and I wanted to find a use for them. Now I’ve got the hang of it I’m planning to make some lengths of bias tape in different prints and patterns, and see about resurrecting my old Etsy shop. I have lots of vintage buttons that I’m never going to use, so I was thinking about listing them, along with some covered buttons and bias tape, and having a little haberdashery clear-out. Chances of this happening soon are minimal, but I’m thinking about it, and that’s a start!

Black Linen Dress

Black linen dress

Okay, so I didn’t dive straight into the organic cottons, but I needed a new black summer dress and I had a piece of linen tucked away in the Shed. It was originally earmarked to become another Regency-ish dress, but I decided to try out a long version of the blue organic tunic instead.

The ruffle’s twice as deep, and I think I might go back and chop a couple of inches off it, because the dress touches the floor. I wanted it to be long, but that’s a bit too long even for me! I haven’t made a matching belt for this one yet – in fact I’ve been wearing it without – but I think it looks quite smart with the blue one.

Having worn it, I also want to go back and add pockets. It’s too late now to put pockets in the side seams (well, I could, but I don’t fancy unpicking overlocked linen!), so it’s going to be big patch pockets on the front. I just need to decide whether to make them in matching black, or whether to have the pockets and belt in a contrasting colour. Maybe I should keep the pockets plain, then I can choose whatever colour belt I’d like.

So Fabulous!

So Fabulous!

My new shoes are so obscenely cute, they make me laugh every time I look at my feet.

Last year I went back to my favourite choir. For the Christmas concert, which required formalwear, I bought an ankle length black dress. Unfortunately my only pair of plain black shoes were flat, and my dress dragged on the floor. Despite being a dressmaker I decided not to hem the dress, but to buy a taller pair of shoes instead. Of course!

These little beauties are by So Fabulous! at Very. The range are wide fitting, which usually means frumpy and horrid, but in this case it means some brilliantly fashionable styles that I can actually wear without cutting off the circulation to my toes. Because this pair are very rounded, they’re actually so wide that I might even have to pop an insole inside them. But that only makes them more comfortable, so it’s a win all round.

I tried them on as soon as they arrived, and these just happened to be the socks I was already wearing that day. Between the curved heels and the chiffon ruffles and the stripes, I suddenly felt as though I was 25 again, and ought to be going out to a goth night! I have a sneaking suspicion that I’m going to get a lot of wear out of these little beauties.