It’s October, and you know what that means: time to get serious about all our Nutcracker prep. Hashtag Costume Designer Life. Here’s a ballet tutu technique that you can cross-apply to making petticoats. This isn’t as much a lolita tutorial as a technique that I’d like to experiment with lolita sometime, that I think has some good potential, but that is going to take a bit of work before it becomes something we’ll use every day.
Someday I’ll actually write a book on Petticoat Theory, but here’s a little bit more for today: when you make a petticoat out of a harder material (like stiff net or crinoline), you need less fabric to get your initial poof shape. However, if your harder fabric becomes softer with age, it will lose that initial poof and become smaller. After a longer period of time, if your fabric becomes soft, your petticoat will be the size that it would have been from the start if you’d made it with a soft fabric.
This does mean, however, that we have the secret to the never-deflating petticoat:
start with a soft fabric, and just use a whole buttload of it. Not half a buttload, not two thirds, but a whole entire buttload of it.But now that we’ve decided that we’re going to use 15 yards of chiffon to make a petticoat, we’re going to run into another problem: it’s not easy to smoothly incorporate a huge amount of fabric in a small space. If you just gather it, you’ll end up with a ridge where you sewed the gathered edge down. To add to that, you might not be able to get as much fabric as you need into one fixed-length section.
To get super maximum fabric smoothly and flatly incorporated into one small space, you need to employ double-flat-pleating. It takes a lot of pins and a little bit of time, but it gets you fabulous results.
Normal pleating, like fork pleating, will take the fabric and make it 1/3rd of its flat length. No matter what size your pleats are, if they lie perfectly next to each other, with no overlap or space between, your fabric will be 1/3rd the length pleated that it was flat.This technique for double-pleating takes the fabric and makes it 1/10th the flat length.
You’re going to want your fabric, some kind of a printed grid to lay your fabric on, and a bunch of straight pins. Since most fabrics you’d want to do this with are sheer (chiffon and soft tulle), working on a grid is the fastest way to get pleats that are somewhat even.
In the interests of being horrible to photograph, I’m using some lavender diamond net. Since you’ll probably be using a long strip of fabric, keep the majority of the fabric rolled or contained some way at the top of your work surface. As you pleat, you’ll collect the pleated fabric down at the bottom, near where your body is.
For your first pleat, put a straight pin in the bottom edge of your fabric. You’ll use it as a landmark later.
Fold the end of your fabric up. I always fold it up three squares, though that’s a bit arbitrary. It doesn’t matter what size my squares are, I fold it up three squares.
Now, fold your fold in half.
In the previous picture, I had the fold of the fabric under my thumb. I’ve taken that folded edge and brought it up to the top of the fold.
Here’s where the grid is really useful, because instead of trying to find the top of the fold, I can bring it to the top edge of the three squares.
My middle finger here is pointing to the pin in my previous pleat. If this is your first pleat, it should be pointing at your landmark pin you put in before you started. My index finger’s at the bottom, pointing to the bottom of the double-fold we just made.
Our next step is to fold the whole piece down so the pin goes directly on top of the edge of the fold.
Right like that. Hold the spot down with your finger. Take the pin out. If you have folded this properly, you should be able to put the pin back exactly where it was, but this time go through all the layers it was through and the edge of the pleat you just made.
And that’s exactly what you should do. Repin your previous pleat (or your landmark pin) and pin your new pleat in when you do so.
You’ll now have a pin on one edge of your pleat, and the other edge sticking out.
Stick another pin in that far edge. When you make your next pleat, this will be the pin you unpin and repin into the pleat you form.
When you’re done, if you’re applying this ruffle to something with stretch (like elastic, or a fabric with 5%+ of spandex), sew a zigzag along the pinned edge and remove your pins. If you are applying it to something that doesn’t stretch (like anything lined with coutil, structured bodices), sew three lines of straight stitching over the pinned edge and remove your pins.
At some point in 2019, in a time after Nutcracker, I’ll see about the potential of using this technque with chiffon to make the ultimate non-deflating cupcake petticoat, unless someone wants to try it first.
hhey it’s another tutorial, y’all really liked the first one, huh? This one is centered around one character, but can be easily applied to any tutus, ruffles, or gathered skirts.
Happy TUTU TUESDAY!!!! When it comes to making a tutu, most of us get frustrated and give up and try and figure out the cheapest place to purchase one, then wear it once, and toss it away because we hate it and spent way too much money acquiring it. That doesn’t have to be the case, though, and you can make tutus of all kinds, within an hour, and exactly to your vision, in a few easy steps.…
