All Things Mum

It's been a good summer and Little Miss isn't short on dresses. However, I just wanted to make her a proper dress now that I learned how to shir on my Janome. It was rather distressing before when I had no idea why it wasn't working. I took this fabric out of my stash and cut using the whole width (selv to selv) to the length I needed for her. It wrapped around her twice so I knew it was enough width to shir and sew up a tube. Oh how I love my rotary cutter. I used it to cut the straps. My sis bought one for me a looong time ago when she went to a craft show. Hubby used it to put our wedding pictures up in a frame and blunted the blade. I tried to use it since then but just thought that it wasn't a good cutter. Now I know better. I have seen the light. Last week I was at Spotlight so I picked up a new blade. It was a revelation when I used it. OMG. Like Wow. I saw perfect straight lines! Fireworks went off in my head. (I've always been melodramatic) The possibili...

There have been a few exciting things happening around here. I was thrilled to win another giveaway! Since hubby has banned me from on-line shopping for a while then these things are especially a blessing and very special! Ha ha. Can you imagine my excitement when I decided to give shirring another go and it worked? Oh my goodness . I had tried this about 2yrs ago and I could not for the life of me figure out why it would never work. Then, the other day I read a post about it on Jelly Baby Blog and watched the Threadbanger video on how to make a summer dress. It looked sooooo easy. So I decided to give it another whirl. This time I did thread the elastic thread in the thread tension thing in the bobbin case. I started sewing and voila!! I was shirring with excitement in no time. It's a bit late to make a shirred maternity top since I don't have long to go. Perhaps a nice shirred summer top instead. Something to think about. Of course, I had to show *hubby* the end result. He ...

She doesn't call it Shir Madness for nothing. I found a shirring tutorial on Sandi Henderson's site PortabelloPixie . I thought, ok, why not give it a whirl? Here are my tragic results. I had to hand gather as no 'shirring' occured. Very difficult as thread breaks, elastic breaks, my patience reaches breaking point. This is my next attempt where I tried to get my thread tension right. You can see that some lines have elastic that is a bit loose and curly. I tried to blast the elastic in an attempt to get some gathering happening but all I ended up with were wet blotches. I asked some 'blog' friends for advice but none of which worked for me. This included: using a tight tension = straight lines and straight elastic but no shirring winding the bobbin using the machine = no more needle thread getting jammed in my bobbin case but still no shirring using the longest stitch length = yeah, ok.. still no shirring Not to say that it won't work for you... it pr...