#cheap lace

[20dollarlolita]

Hand-sewn scallop trim

Lace is expensive. At the fabric superstore that I spend a lot of time at, lace can sell for as much as $25 a yard.

This ball of string was $2. And look at that, it comes with free lint!

This ball is polyester kite string (because this is part of the 20dollarlolita No Fabric Store Challenge, and you can find it in the hardware store), but size 20 or 30 crochet string will work just as well.

You’re going to need something to put your edging onto. Try it on a purse or a headbow for your first try. A skirt hem will take you roughly 4 years. Collars are tricky, because a collar frames your face, so uneven spaces become very obvious.

You’ll also need a needle that has an eye large enough for your thread to go through, and a medium to long length, but that also has a point sharp enough to easily go through your fabric.

I used the largest needle in a little circular package of “assorted needles.”

It’s a good idea to do five or six practice scallops before you go onto the finished piece. There’s only two tricks to this technique, but they’re both important.

If you’re doing this technique as an edging or on a hem, you’re going to have a fold or seam to come out of.

And back in it goes. The width of this stitch determines the width of your scallop.

Bring your thread back to the side that you started on. Don’t pull the loop tight. It needs to stay as its own little loop. The amount of thread in this loop determines how deep the scallop will be, or how far away the center of the scallop will be from the edge of the fabric.

Now you need to tie a knot at the edge of your scallop. This is very important, because without this knot, the scallops will pull thread from each other and become very uneven in size.

Any knot that keeps the scallop in place works. Here’s a close-up of the one I use, with allegedly helpful arrows.

Note that the needle isn’t going through fabric here. It’s just knotting around the string.

Do a little line of thread loopies. I find that it’s much easier to do five or six at a time, than to try to tackle the whole piece at once.

There are two things that make this technique look good. The first one is getting these thread loopies the same distance apart from each other, and the same size within the loopie. If you need to, make guiding marks on the wrong side of your fabric.

Start working back the way you came. We’re going to cover that thread loop in blanket stitches.

The blanket stitch looks like the left, and the buttonhole stitch looks like the right. The difference between the two is that the blanket stitch goes behind the needle one time, and the buttonhole stitch goes behind the needle twice.

Here’s a(n unfocused) picture of a scallop I did with the buttonhole stitch. It’s a different look than the blanket stitch, but neither is incorrect. Consistency across the whole scallop is more important than if it has the buttonhole purl along the edge.

On this one, I used the blanket stitch. It makes for a softer edge and a softer lace. It’s also about twice as fast for me to do, just because of muscle memory I’ve built up. Blanket stitches are easier to slide around on the foundation loop, which gives you more wiggle room (ha!) for getting the tension right.

As this picture shows, you can make the stitch in the center of the loop, and then slide it to the side when you tighten it. This also makes the process go much faster.

There’s the two things that will make or kill this technique, and here’s one. The stitches need to be nearly identical. Don’t cram too many stitches onto a loop, but don’t leave space between them. Get all the edges of the loops all in the same direction. Don’t pull the stitches all the way tight, but don’t let them get floppy. There’s about 15 things to keep an eye out for, but they all sum up to “make it look good.” This little finicky business is why it’s important to do about ten practice scallops before you start on your final project.

Once you’re done, tie off your thread, and start aligning the loops. Give it some quality time with you making sure a scallop is perfect, and then pressing it with your iron so it stays perfectly aligned.

And then you’re done! All the lace edging you can want, for the cost of a ball of string.

[20dollarlolita]

I have a 4 yard piece of black cotton that I'd like to make a lolita dress with, but I don't have any trim. I'm thinking about putting buttons fown the front and making pintucks, and having a ruffle at the bottom, but I'm afraid it will still be too plain. Any ideas?

Okay, I was going to answer this a few days ago, because I didn’t want it to get eaten in all the replica debacle, so here’s an answer:

Details details details details, is my first piece of advice. When you’re making a solid color piece, a good rule of thumb (hand) is that you shouldn’t have a space on the skirt bigger than your hand that doesn’t have a detail in it.

(Blurry pic warning, proceed with caution)

For this case, folds in the fabric and seamlines do count as a details. Here’s the skirt from the No Fabric Store Challenge. As I’m going to talk about when I finish that challenge, I specifically chose pleats because they create visual detail. If I’d made this skirt as an a-line, where the whole middle sits flat, there would be a large chunk of fabric in the middle where nothing’s happening. You can see down near the hem, it starts to fill out and the creases and pleats disappear. I put the trim near the hem, where the visual interest would otherwise disappear.

This JSK is aware of that. Not only is it using a solid color Jacquard fabric that has its own detail woven in, but it still has details added to all the empty space. It’s a princess seamed dress, so it doesn’t have gathering or pleating to create texture at the waistline. Because of this, the accents at the hem come up much higher. Not only that, but they’re much bigger. This JSK has shiny ribbon and bows, lace trimming the ribbon, the ribbon-lace-bow combo heading off frills, and then there’s lace down at the hem again.

This OP has the same design sort of going on (dividing the skirt in 3′s, detailing the sides more than the front), but all of the decoration can start much lower on the skirt, because there’s texture from the gathering at the waist. This is also not a solid-color OP. In both this and the JSK’s case, having slightly textured/patterned fabric helps a whole lot with visual interest. When you’re working with a solid black, you have to work just a bit harder at keeping that texture both balanced and present.

Okay, so this JSK also has the super-detailed-sides thing going for it. That’s a lot more to do with sampling error than it is The True Way To Make A Dress or whatever. These are just dresses I own and it’s a look I like. Anyway, here’s an all-black JSK that uses minimal trim. There’s the two vertical stripes that define the center and the side panels. Almost all the rest in pintucks and ruffles, with some bows.

This OP has almost no trim, but it uses two kinds of fabrics. All of the techniques on this dress you can pull off with one fabric, if you’re using a fabric in weight somewhere from quilt calico to cotton sateen. Anything that’s thin enough that it’ll ruche like that and thick enough that you can’t see through it.

I’m going into detail about the different pieces because I think that’s where more handmade lolita messes up the most. Even subdued lolita and more classical pieces tend to have a lot of detailing in them.

Back to your question: If you don’t have lace, I’d add style seaming in the skirt. Either doing two vertical seams (like the pink OP and the black and cream JSKs) or dividing the skirt into horizontal tiers like a petticoat. Pin tucks are great in the bodice and on the skirt. Little bows are great for breaking up big spaces, too.

If you’ve already made the skirt, but are looking for how to attach it to the bodice, pleating it instead of gathering it, and then carefully pressing the pleats, will create its own kind of look.

I would normally suggest searching the “solid color” tag on lolibrary, but as of my writing this, their site is still a bit funky after the update and their search is still not quite that functional. The old daily-lolita livejournal still has a functioning solid color tag that you might be able to get some inspiration from.

[chartertechnologyenablwcp]

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