I bought a second Vogue pattern during the recent half price sale, Vogue 1152 at right… and have been making it up using some cheap chambray cotton. And was all happily whizzing along and halfway through when I realised I needed some piping to proceed. And didn’t have any. Fear not, I do not let piddly obstacles such as not having the correct materials at hand stop me from contriving some sort of substitute out of whatever is floating around in the laundry cupboard where my stash lives. And is actually being chipped away at at a nice steady pace, thankyou for asking. But I digress… back to the piping…
I fashioned my own piping out of leftover scraps of the chambray and thought to take a few photos to illustrate, as I think this is a cool way to use up small scraps that are otherwise useless and save, oh OK, only a few cents, but every little bit counts, right? As well as saving planetary resources, etc.
At first I had the bright idea of making a twisted strip of piping. I thought of doing this as the proper piping rope you buy is twisted… So I just cut some strips of the length required, plus about a third (roughly), this extra is to allow for length lost by twisting.
Twisted and ironed flat. Immediately noticed was no good. Now I think the ironing is where the problem lay. The twisted strip appeared a nice even piece of cord and looked just right but when ironed, it flattened along the twists and developed lumps and bumps most undesirable in a piping cord… so this method had to be abandoned.
On to plan B. Folded the strip carefully in equal thirds longwise and ironed just enough on low heat to make the creases a mere memory on the fabric…
The set the machine stitching to as loose as possible and sewed down the centre of the strip. This created a nice fat cord-like strip that had a nature pretty close to piping…
So went ahead and encased the wannabe piping in my contrast bias binding…
and Bob’s your uncle. Not tooooo bad? (They don’t look terribly even in this photo, but that is because the bottom two strips have been ironed flat while the top one was left unironed to avoid messing up those gathers above it … when I realised this I went back and hand-puffed some life back up into those two bottom contrast strips and now they match OK, for a day dress…)
So onwards and upwards. I actually had finished this dress pretty much to the pattern, and look at these sleeves…
Anyone who knows me will know for sure that these sleeves are so not-me. (Ha! That was a fun sentence, no?) So my next project is to fix up those sleeves. And will show the finished result tomorrow…
It’s not that I don’t like puffy sleeves. I think in the right fabric, say a very light floaty chiffon, the sleeves would flop down attractively like the dress on the pattern envelope and look fine. But in this chambray, which has a lot of body to it, the puffs are just not right.
