Week 5: Refining an Old Tutu


What better way to celebrate world tutu day (2/2) than to fix up a tutu I made for my squid costume?  After all, what's a cephalopod without a cloud of ink?

I'm going to apologize now for the quality of the photos.  I have really shaky hands and sometimes my camera can take good pictures really easily, and sometimes it just won't.

Again, when I made this costume the first time, I didn't have my machine, so most of the sewing was done by hand and in the span of about 2 days, which left me with a wearable, but very sloppy ensemble. I decided to cut out the old stitches, then regather the tulle, and then sew it on by machine this time.

The underside of the basque.  The lowest layer was actually not terrible, so I left that as is, but I redid the other 2 layers and added in a 4th.

The waistband and basque is made of a stretch fake leather looking fabric that I got as a remnant, and then the skirt has 4 layers with a total of 16 yards of double layer black tulle.  For those of you doing the math, that's 4 yards per layer.  I wasn't able to get that much tulle in one cut, so the bottom two layers are two cuts of 2 yards each.  Normally, I would do a quick French seam to get them to join together, but I left enough overlap so that the gap isn't obvious, and also the top two layers wound up being so nearly opaque that it's really not noticeable. It's also much easier to work with the smaller cuts than the large 4 yard cuts.

Hopefully you can kind of see what I'm talking about with the gathering in sections.

Here's a quick tip for how I find it easiest to evenly gather down huge pieces of fabric to much smaller ones.  On the basque, I marked down the center with a line of pins, and then I folded the outside edges to the center to find the quarter marks, which I also marked with lines of pins.  Next, I took the tulle that I was gathering down, laid it out and marked the center and quarter points with a pin at the top of each point.  Then I matched up these points and pinned the tulle at the edges of the basque, at the quarter marks, and the center mark.  From there, I gathered down one section of tulle at a time by threading my needle through the back of the basque, gathering down the first section, then pulling my needle through the basque again at the next pin.  I tried to evenly spread out the gathers, then started pinning along that thread from the center of that section outward.  I found this made it very easy to make sure the gathers were evenly distributed as well as to adjust the length of the gather to the basque to avoid pulling or puckering.

Fixed underside.  Still far from professional, but much better than it was.

I didn't take a picture of the original hook and eye position I had on the waistband because it was a complete disaster and it was done on the spur of the moment because I had about 5 minutes before I had to be out the door and needed to make sure my skirt wouldn't fall off.  I didn't reattach hooks and loops because I'm planning on sewing some sequins and beads on the outer layer of tulle later, and I want to do it before I close up the back of the tutu because I have a feeling it'll be much easier to maneuver when I'm embellishing.

Final finished outside

I actually like the look of the waistband with the visible stitching, and I was careful to make sure the running stitch I used was very relatively even and precise, so I'm leaving that as is. When I was first sewing it, I tried to hide the stitching in its own seam, but it was puckering anyway, so I just switched to a running stitch and I wound up liking it better.

It's kind of hard to explain, but I stitched on top of the tulle for the lower 3 layers, so those layers have a little bit of gathers showing, but I stitched the top layer of tulle from the underside so that when the tulle falls, it covers the gathered edge.  Hopefully the picture makes this make sense.

So sorry it's blurry, but hopefully you can see the difference in how I sewed the lower 3 layers and the top.

Money part:  I had everything already, so I didn't spend any money this week!  Since I went over budget last month, I'm taking that excess out of February's budget to try to get back on track.

Week 5 budget: $1.92
Week 5 spent: $0
Week 5 leftover: $1.92

February budget: $6.09
February spent: $0
February leftover: $6.09

Year budget: $100
Year spent: $10.57
Year left: $89.43

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