Ruffly Business

The dress features scalloped ruffles along the front of the underskirt. I decided the smart way to make these would be to somehow trace out the scallop shape onto the organza, and then use a decorative stitch to finish the edge. I did the test strip without any stabilizer, and just drawing on the scallops took forever. There had to be a better way. 

I had purchased a roll of sticky solvy to use for appliqués later in the project, and realized that I could use a short length of the stabilizer as a template. The fabric and the sticky solvy were both transparent enough to allow tracing the pattern from the back of the stabilizer to the front of the fabric. I just removed and replaced it down the length of the ruffle until the entire 11 yards of ruffle were marked with the scallop edge. 

I used a decorative stitch on my machine in matching thread to trace out the scallops as evenly as possible, while also going as fast as I could manage. Before tracing on the pattern I had sewn all 9 pieces together into one long strip. I figured this would use the fabric the most efficiently, and I would cut out the four tiers of ruffles after the full length was hemmed. I used this technique for every layer in the ruffle, even though they were hemmed differently. As I stitched the scallops I pin marked any messy parts or where I had to switch the bobbin, with the goal of hiding the ugliest parts under the overskirt, or if I was lucky, trimming them off completely. Once the scallops were fully stitched, I carefully cut out around them with regular scissors.

I went with stitching on the scallop hem without a backing, because I didn't want to have to melt that much stabilizer, it's just kind of gross and can leave a bit of residue. And for this hem any shifting that might have happened without it didn't matter too much. I did use it later as a backing for the appliqués and while it did dissolve away, the organza shrank a little in the warm water. This ended up being fine for that part of the project, but I think might have been a minor disaster in the ruffle department. 

Each tier of ruffles ended up being composed of 3 layers of silk, two organza and one chiffon. I usually like a ruffle that's made of at least three times the width of the final product, but I realized that I did not have enough yardage to make that happen. I ended up doing a bunch of math a bunch of times, and ended up with the top two pieces being sewn together at their top edge, and the bottom piece being offset by two inches in order to use less fabric. This meant I needed to line up the hems of the two pink layers so the bottom organza layer wouldn't poke out. It was there to add a little opacity and body to the pink chiffon layer sitting above it. 

It was also around this time when my original plan to attach all of these ruffles to a mesh skirt went sideways. I wanted to keep the blush underskirt free of ruffles so I could use it for other historically inspired projects, so I figured a mesh skirt overtop would be a good solution. You get the blush color at the top, and the ruffles don't have to be attached to the taffeta. However, the mesh was not strong enough for the beefy boys the ruffles ended up being, and was sagging fairly dramatically when they were all pinned on, and I didn't have very much of the taffeta left. I figured out I had enough taffeta to at least back the ruffles, so I cut the front mesh pattern where the ruffles should start, added tailors tape to the seams of the mesh skirt to help hold the weight, and sewed the taffeta panel to the mesh front before top stitching on all the ruffles. If you get up close and take a peek, you can see the pink taffeta just behind the ruffled top edge of the first tier. 

In total time this part of the project took maybe 5 times as long as I thought it would. The placement of the ruffles alone was an entire day that I had to do twice once I realized the mesh couldn't hold the weight. But it has a big impact, and I'm happy with the final results. The contrasting colors and yards of voluminous silk do the job they're supposed to do and look fancy and expensive. There's about six yards of silk in there, so maybe 100 dollars worth of materials including the mesh and thread. This wasn't a bargain project at all, I wanted my materials to reflect the work I put into the project, and to match the style of late victorian fantasy. There's also the bonus that discount silk organza and chiffon is not much more expensive than decent poly versions, and sometimes cheaper. 

For this part of the project I shopped at Mood in NYC, and at Fabric Mart (referral link to their rewards program). Fabric Mart's prices have gone up, but it is still possible to get silks for $12-16 per yard when they're on sale, and they do a rotating sale every day. At Mood, check the bolts before getting yardage cut. I didn't have any problems with the organzas, but the taffeta I purchased had encountered a greasy roller at some point in its life, and had dark horizontal streaks randomly across the length. I was able to work around it, but it's great when you don't need to work around flaws in expensive fabric.