CKC Sew-Along Days 3-4

I have not been a very good member of this Sew-Along. I was excited and ready to go last week - you know, before I actually had to do anything but pick out my fabric. But now reality has set in, or more specifically the realization that I have to ruffle my ruffle fabric.

Saturday's steps were super easy and I knocked them out in about 5 minutes. I was happy to stop there, step back and look at my progress. Ok, not so much progress but I like to enjoy the little things.

The fabulous thing about working with knits is that they don't fray. For this reason, I didn't have to hem my ruffle fabric. Yay! Got to sit that step out on Sunday. But that meant those darn ruffles were just waiting for me Monday morning.

I was not even going to attempt to hand gather these ruffles (all 5 yards of them) and I was scared to death of machine gathering so I pulled out my handy dandy ruffle foot. Do you have one of these? It's insanely intimidating to look at but I love the results I get when I actually use it. I discovered that there is in fact a secret to using this foot if you don't want to rely on trial and error. You see, the Scientific Seamstress has put together a wonderful, thorough guide on the ruffle foot called "The Ruffler...Unruffled." But what I discovered when I read through it was that there are numbers and math involved and my head started to hurt. I'll save that for another day. Today I'm ruffling knits and I knew that with the stretchiness of this fabric, I didn't need to be exact.

I set my stitch length at the default 5.5 and the foot on the 6 which means it will gather the fabric every 6 stitches. I ran my fabric through and while it did ruffle, it just didn't wow me. I knocked my stitch length down to about 4 and look at these lovelies! I can't get enough of them. I want to ruffle all my ruffle fabric!

The last step was hemming by top skirt and I'm all caught up. Until tomorrow.

CKC Sew-Along Day 1

So it's day one of the Create Kids Couture Sew-Along and I'm already dying to work ahead. I hadn't planned on using this ruffle fabric for the bottom ruffle, especially since I've never worked with it, but I think it will be so fun. And they are offering prizes so I wanted mine to stand out.

Create Kids Couture Sew-Along

Are you a member of the CKC Sew-Along Facebook Group? This is the first sew-along hosted by Create Kids Couture and the first time I've been involved in one.

What is a sew-along? Glad you asked. I like the way Sewaholic compares a sew-along to a long distance meet up. When my husband and I were courting (yes, I said "courting," but that's a story for another day), we were separated by 1500 miles. We would do things like watch movies at the same time and come together via Skype to talk about it afterwards. That's sorta what a sew-along is. We all work from the same pattern and schedule, documenting our progress along the way. In the end, we each have a completed garment, in this case the beautiful Antoinette's Double Layer Twirly Skirt.

Just look at how adorable this is!

Antoinette's Double Layer Twirly Skirt
by Create Kids Couture

While it officially kicked off last week, the first step is purchasing your fabric (or raiding your fabric stash), washing, ironing and buying the pattern. We won't actually make the first cut until tomorrow. From there, we will complete one or two steps a day for a week and by the next Friday we will have a complete skirt. Not too shabby.

The hardest part for me will be not jumping ahead. And isn't this corset top adorable too? It's a little too grown up for my 1year old but I would love to make one of these.

I will be posting each day of the sew-along and would love to see pictures of your skirts if you will be joining us.

A New Chapter...

Hello everyone. We are finally starting out our blog for Dandelion & Daffodil. If you don't already know about us, we make boutique children's clothing and accessories with your growing child in mind. That's right - most of our items are made to grow with your child or be worn during any season. It is our belief that if a customer should spend their money on boutique clothes, they should be able to get their money's worth of wear. We hope that you enjoy our blog and share us with your friends.

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