Respect the Ruffle

The hot pink petticoat for my daughter's class play is completed!

I pretty much made this skirt up as I went along, having no image or measurements as a starting point. The teacher gave me a meter of fabric and requested the skirt be "really big and wide", so I folded that meter in half length-wise and cut two meter-long rectangles from it. I sewed those together for the skirt. I gathered the top and sewed on a separate waistband (made from a 28" x 4" rectangle) so there wouldn't be too much fabric caught up in the elastic around the child's waist.

Did you know that you need 2x as much fabric for the ruffle as you need for the main body? That means 4 meters of fabric, who knows how much thread and 3 hours later, I had a single (yet fabulous) ruffle gracing the bottom of the 2 meter wide skirt. Who knew ruffles could be so demanding? Whew!

Whether you like ruffles or you don't, my new motto is "Respect the Ruffle." Seriously. When you see a ruffle, know that someone went to a heckuva lot of trouble to make it. I can now appreciate the work involved (even if the result isn't really my thing). The good news is I made this while my girls were at school. They haven't seen it, so they won't insist on having their own anytime soon. Again, I say, "whew!"

In a small effort at self-preservation, I emailed the teacher and told her she'd need to find another class mom to sew the pocket project she had also requested. I'll return that fabric tomorrow. Next up, I have some pants to sew for a little friend of ours...