SWA(SP)P 2016-Pack 1-#12: Frilled to Bits!

All done.  I can hardly believe it!  Nothing to do now but take the photos.  And make a gazillion accessories and extensions.  And make just as many things for the wife…

It’s been quite a week:  after being soooo focussed and productive for two weeks+ over Easter, I had to acclimatise to getting up early, PUTTING CLOTHES ON, and going back to work.  Meh.  It’s a relatively easy time of year for me, but quite boring, as in the run up to the exams, almost all lessons become revision workshops.  Important, useful to the students, but pretty dull.  I got very very tired by Wednesday as well, and started edging towards a migraine.  I’ll adjust.

As for the sewing:  it was slower than I’d hoped of course.  First my treasured [and vital, cos I can’t see without it] daylight lamp went kaput-the lamp fell off.  Apparently the ball joint snapped.  Fortunately, my wonderful missus fixed it for me with a couple of guitar stand clamps…or some such.  Yay!

My ironing board cover has also dies, but will have to wait until payday to be replaced.  Look at this disgraceful evidence of never lowering the temperature on the iron!

To start off, I whacked an easy elastic waistband onto the old RTW linen skirt, after trimming it down from the waist and removing the old zip. It also needed a little patch and darn job where the one seam had torn very slightly.  Nice save!  My green fabrics were already sorted and pressed.

Then  I did some calculating, and realised I needed about 70 pieces to make my tiers.  For some reason, I’d decided that parallelograms would look nicer than boring old rectangles, and after some faffing produced an aesthetically pleasing rhombus, roughly 7″ to a side, with 45 degree angled sides…AND for some unknown reason, I also decided to cut them out using my rotary cutter, which I hate, and am rather scared of…doh.  It took ages, and a state of constant I’m-about-to-chop-my-fingers-off terror.

Then, after all these months of historical/couture hand sewing, I thought ‘buggrit!  Millennium hand and shrimp!’ and got the overlocker threaded up.

Yes, my SWAP arrived back in the 21st century!  Hurrah for time travel!

 

After all that precision cutting, I made a real hack job of sewing all the bits together into loops, ending up with ALL FOUR tiers badly out of whack at each long edge.  Sigh.  So much for my maths.  Meh, blame the bias.  I set to with the overlocker again, and hacked both edges off ‘level’.  I then turned under a narrow single hem on one long edge, and machined them.  I pressed under a narrow hem on the other edge, and then the fun began- MY NEW RUFFLER!

Look what it can do!

This doesn’t make me as happy as the buttonholer, but it’s close.  I decided not to tempt the sewing gods though, there’s a lot of flare in that skirt, and I wasn’t sure if my trial run on calico would work as beautifully sewing tiers [consisting of six different fabrics] to linen.  Nah.

I did use the ruffler to gather up all the tiers though, and it did  a good job, even though the bias pieces did upset it slightly, messing up my gathering ratios a tad.  Easily fixed with some judicious tucks.  I sewed the ruffles on, overlapping by a scant 1/4″, then went in between, adding in [ruffled of course] black lace.  And ran out.  Sigh.  Fortunately, the last piece of the very wide stuff that adorns the silver skirt was a perfect length [and width] to act as a top tier.

This is a brilliant stash busting piece, some of that lace and fabric has been in stash for 20 years or so.

No make-up, hair barely brushed, what a sight…but here we are, the 11th item of my first-ever SWAP is done!

It works with the riding jacket [which I chose purely because I can wear it without a corset, and couldn’t be bothered]

It has a nice Spanish feel to it, and will look good with the black or white shirts and a wide belt or underbust corset…as well as the other green jacket of course.  It may even work with the dark purple jacket, I’ll play when I get the time…