My sewing these days is mostly quilting and I found myself longing to step back into the baby heirloom stitching just for the joy of it. I thought you might benefit from the little tricks I remembered. The garment is a baby dress with a high curved yolk, puffy sleeves, lacy collar and gently gathered skirt which is also 'curved' to set into the yolk. When I went to stitch the skirt onto the yolk I realized that the seam allowance of the skirt was going to show through the yolk. I applied a light-weight interfacing to the yolk and that solved that. Applying a sweet Swiss lace insertion on the skirt presented another challenge since the skirt has a bit of an A-line cut to it. I lengthened the stitch length from default to about 3 and decreased the tension to 3 also. That let me lightly stitch the lace on without even the hint of a pucker. =) I wanted the hem edge to be sturdy (hoping the dress may be passed down or passed around) and a serged edge would be too heavy. We forget that our SMs will do just anything including a fine edge. You use the 3-toed foot, set the needle position hard left, adjust a plain zig-zag to very skinny and nearly, nearly a satin stitch. The cut fabric edge is placed just one thread to the right of that middle toe. Oh my, oh wow. How exquisite. This is long and I know most of you don't 'do' christening gowns but just had to share the happy with you. Polly
- posted
12 years ago