It called for voile or double gauze or some “minimal fray” fabric. Well, maybe I’m just an idiot still, but I’m finding the readily available fabric stores to be sorely lacking in labeling their fabrics. “100% cotton” doesn’t tell me much. Which reminds me…
A few entries back I was complaining about the lack of an organized reference for fabric. In hunting for an online glossary yesterday, I found this book: The Fashion Designer’s Textile Directory.
I bought the Kindle edition because it’s cheaper, and I can have it ready to reference no matter where I am, even though I really prefer a physical book.
It’s pretty fabulous. It gives way more than just a one-sentence explanation about different fabric types, and it does it in a way that’s straightforward and well-illustrated. Here’s an example showing voile, which I’d never heard of until I got my One-Yard Wonders book.
So I don’t have any voile, and I’m not sure where to find it at Joann’s or Hobby Lobby if they have it.
So my “minimal fray” fabric I went with was a ribbed knit. I wasn’t sure how it was going to turn out trying to make this ruffly scarf with a completely different type of fabric than intended, but I just went for it. I finished it tonight, and I love it. Like way more than I thought I would. I’m not big into ruffly things to begin with, but the texture it adds is amazing, I love the versatile gray color and it fills a hole I had in my modest scarf collection, I love that it can be casual or shabby chic, and it’s soft and warm.
It’s far from perfectly made, but the nature of the thing hides any iffy areas pretty well.
I also added a final seam to it to close it into a long tube. It seemed to want to roll that way anyway so I just went with it, and hiding the “ugly” unruffled side with the 5 seams running down the length of it just made sense.
I used my walking foot for the whole thing. The project said to cut a 32″ thread and then hand-stitch the basting stitches to make the ruffles. I guffawed at that and went right to my machine. Sorry, I’m not hand basting like 400 inches of stitches when I have a sewing machine right there. It was way easier to just use the machine, and then pull the threads to make the gathers til it measured 32″.
I’m still trying to get my feet under me when it comes to working knits through the machine. Even with the walking foot, it seemed like I had to feed the fabric crooked to get it to sew straight. Which makes NO sense. Unless it’s a stretching issue, but nothing really looks stretched out on the scarf. /shrug I’ll just have to keep playing til I crack the secret I guess.
Next up, another pair of arm warmers using my left-over fabric from the scarf, and after that, a knit mini skirt based on one of my favorites that I bought that seems pretty easy to reverse engineer (plans already laid out!), followed by a stretchy pair of leggings (also based on a pair I have.)
I’m gettin’ ambitious, ya’ll.
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