How to SEW a Simple Tutu

Usually I am the one searching for tutorials on how to make things.  I admit it.  If it’s something that doesn’t really need a pattern, I’m not about to spend the money to buy one when all I need are decent instructions.  So when I was asked to make angelic tutus for the angels in our church’s Christmas program, I opened my big mouth and volunteered to make them.  I figured a few minutes of googling would generate a dozen or so tutorials on what I wanted to do.

I was wrong.  There are dozens of tutorials on how to NOT sew a tutu.  There are a few on how to make tiered tutus a la the peasant skirt.  There are a few on how to sew them onto random things like the bottom of a tank top or a skirt an adult would wear out to a night club.

BUT THERE ARE NO TUTORIALS ON HOW TO SEW A STINKIN’ TUTU!!!

So I made no less than 4 trial tutus before I figured out how to do this simple variety.  And now, because I was so frustrated in trying to do something so simple without directions, I am putting together this tutorial for those who are wanting to make a simple, sewn tutu that works. 

First of all, I feel that I must share what I have learned about the fabrics available out there for making a tutu.  All of the (no sew) tutorials say to run out and buy a roll of tulle.  This is great if you only want a sewn tutu that is 6-9 inches long.  Not so great if you want a long romantic one with a bit of flowiness.  I couldn’t find any tulle on a bolt.  What I did find was “illusion”, nylon net, and can can net at Hancock Fabrics.

There’s a reason they call it “illusion.”  This stuff is light and airy and you can get it in iridescent colors.  It’s 108 inches wide and gathers beautifully.  You spend an hour or so cutting, gathering, and sewing while humming “Waltz of the Snowflakes.”  You put it on your precious darling and after 30 seconds of twirling it looks like she’s wearing a meringue around her waste. 

Yes.  It’s an illusion that it will turn out nice and stay that way.  I think this stuff is better suited for wedding veils or something.  Come to think of it.  It does look a bit like a bunched up bridal..thingy.  If there’s ever a pie fairy who needs a wedding outfit, I know how to make her one.

The can can netting is much denser and stiffer.  It’s 54 inches wide and comes in white.  I’ve made a longer tutu out of it and decided that it is best suited for the shorter Swan Lake style tutu.  You could use this kind in the same way I describe here just as well.  Just be aware that it will turn out stiffer and need less layers.

The 72 inch wide nylon netting worked the best for my romantic tutu.  It also comes in a variety of colors.

I’ll stop babbling already and get on with the actual tutorial!

Materials:
nylon netting
measuring tape/yardstick
scissors
thread
needle
elastic (I used 1/2 inch wide)
pins
sewing machine

1. Start by figuring out how long you want your tutu to be.  Multiply that number by the number of layers you’d like.  This is how much you’ll want to buy.

In this case, I wanted a 16 inch long, 4 layer tutu.
16 X 4 = 64 –> about 1 and 7/8 yards
(this will leave extra if they don’t cut it perfectly even at the store)

2. Cut out your layers of fabric at your desired length.  Don’t worry about the width.  You’ll use all 72 inches of it and gather it to a less daunting measurement.

For this tutu I have 4 layers of 72 inch wide, 16 inch long netting.

It comes folded in fourths.  I leave it that way for cutting.

3. Cut the waist elastic.  Take the the waist measurement of your ballerina and cut a piece of elastic that length plus an extra half inch. 

20 + 1/2 = 20 1/2 inches

4. Overlap the ends of the elastic and sew them together.

5. Gather each layer of netting to the waist measurement.  You could use your long machine stitch and pull the bobbin threads up.  I prefer to do it by hand because I can measure out the thread to the approximate length I want it to gather and not have to fuss with it so much.

Pull your thread out to the waist measurement plus 2 inches.

Double it up.

Thread your needle and knot the end.  I like to use a large, blunt one since the holes are already in the fabric and I tend to prick myself a bit. 

Start at one end of the netting near the top.  Slide your thread through it and tie it to that end.  Work your needle in and out along the top edge.  You don’t have to be exact.  I’ve counted holes to the exact stitch and done it randomly.  the ending result is the same.

Once you reach the end of the netting, tie off the end as close to the needle as you can and snip the thread between the knot and the needle.

You should end up with a gathered length that is pretty close to the length of the elastic.

Do this with all of your layers.

6. Pin your gathered layers to the elastic.  Line up the top edge of the layer with the top edge of the elastic.  I’m paranoid about missing a layer, so I go a little beyond the top edge.

I recommend staggering where you start/stop them so that you don’t have a slit in your tutu.  I have found that I have to pin each layer on individually.  I use the same pins for all of the layers and repin the first layer(s) as I add each additional one. 

7. Sew your layers to your elastic.  Set your stitch to straight.  Sew 2-3 stitches and backstitch 2-3 stitches.  Change your stitch to the longest, widest zig zag stitch on your machine.  (Unless it happens to have a stitch wider than your elastic.  I’ve never seen one that does it wider than 1/2 an inch, but that doesn’t mean you don’t have one that does!)  Do NOT stretch your elastic as you sew.  Sew all the way around with your elastic as centered as possible under the presser foot and needle.  When you get all the way around, change your stitch back to straight, sew 2-3 stitches and backstitch 2-3 stitches.

Be careful of getting one of the holes looped over the presser foot!  Going slowly and holding down the netting to the left of the foot as I feed it through helps.

8. Stretch out the elastic.  You will hear the gathering stitches break.  Don’t panic.  The zig zag stitch will stretch with the elastic but the gather stitches won’t.  Look for any loose gather stitches and pull them out gently. 

Note:  It IS possible to pull the elastic hard enough to break the zigzag stitches, but you’d have to be trying to pull the elastic to its limits.  This is unnecessary unless your ballerina’s hip to waist ratio is greater than the stretch of the elastic.  The goal here is to break only the gather stitches, not use the waistband as a bungee cord.  If you do manage to snap the zig zags, you can go around the tutu again with your zig zag stitch and it will still stretch.  I’ve sewn 4 layers on separately this way and still gotten a decent stretch.  It just looked really messy with all the stitching.

9. Flip the tutu. Turn the tutu so that the long part of the netting covers the stitching and the “pokey” top is pointing down.  Only elastic and thread should be on the inside.

10. Put the tutu on your ballerina!

If you want to add vertical ribbons, keep in mind that you will want to put them on before you start to pin your netting to the elastic so that they will be on top when you flip the tutu.

If you are making a dark colored tutu and the blaring white elastic band showing is not desired, don’t flip the tutu. 

For reference, this photo shows the tutu”unflipped.”  The flipping just adds a little more fluffiness.  (My model was done by this time.  Please excuse the pitiful face.)

If you absolutely hate working with elastic, sew the gathered layers together along the top and sandwich them between a 2-4 inch wide piece of satin ribbon folded over.  Sew the bottom edges of the folded ribbon together.  Leave enough ribbon at each end for tying.

Happy sewing!

Laundry Detergent Detective Work

Most of you who read this blog know that I cloth diaper.  One of the issues people often have when cloth diapering is ammonia stink brought on by detergent build up in the diapers.  If you investigate cloth diapering boards, you will see 101 different ways to solve this problem, most of which involve using very little detergent and a bazillion rinses.  So I decided to go a little beyond this concept and just wash on super hot without any.  This worked very well for a while and then my diapers started to smell like Windex after every pee. 

So began the searching and researching to see how to fix my problem.  Apparently, I had missed the fact that using no detergent at all will leave a build up of ammonia salts in the diapers, which give off no odor at all when dry, but begin to, erm, wake up the faint after a quick pee.  So, time to find a good detergent that will really clean the diapers and rinse away clean without a bazillion rinses to get the “residue” out.

I keep seeing that Rockin Green is the best detergent for such a job.  It even comes in a formula for hard water that tends to leave deposits in diapers.  This sounds great to me!  Deposits in diapers = bad!  It has to!  On top of that it claims to be environmentally friendly and uses many “natural” and “biodegradable” ingredients!  Woo hoo! 

Then I decided to get the scoop on the ingredients listed.  (Thank you wikipedia!)

1. Sodium carbonate aka washing soda or soda ash.  According to this site, washing soda is a natural water softener and laundry booster.  I have this in my laundry room already.

2. Sodium percabonate aka oxyclean or an oxygen cleaner.  Again, this stuff lives in my laundry room.

3. Natural chelating ingredients.  This one was a bit harder to discern for me, but when it comes to laundry, a chelating agent is some sort of water softener.  Following that line of thinking, I look into various water softeners used in laundry formulations.  Three jump out at me as being able to assume the “natural” label: sodium chloride (salt!), sodium citrate (citric acid), and Borax.  I’m putting my money on the last one since the box has it screaming at you that it is “all natural” and it purports to be a water softener aka chelating ingredient.  It could be all three, since ingredients is plural.  Either way, I have salt in my cupboard and Borax in my laundry room.

4. Sodium sulfate.  According to wiki, this is a filler often used in powdered laundry detergents.  Really?  A filler?  This was getting more disappointing by the second.  I was under the impression that being green meant less waste.  Maybe this product meant green more in the penny pinching way than the tree hugging way, and I missed it somehow.  This filler business really irks me.  This is the one ingredient I don’t have in my house.  Somehow I’m not disappointed.

5. Biodegradable surfactants.  I’m going to go with the simplest possibility here since everything else has turned out to be super simple and say that this ingredient is most likely…wait for it…wait for it…SOAP! 

6. Natural fragrance oils.  So this doesn’t really have much to do with how this stuff works.  It just makes it smell yummy.  For the record, I have several essential oils in my washroom as well. 

So, big deal?  Someone has put together a bunch of fairly common, readily available ingredients (minus the sodium sulfate filler) and put them in a pretty package to charge about the same as Tide.  I suppose I wouldn’t have been quite so taken aback if I didn’t already have a jug of homemade laundry detergent already sitting in my laundry room with pretty much the exact same ingredients in liquid form. 

Dang it!  I should have come up with this idea.  Or perhaps I could have come up with some sort of special laundry treatment and just repackaged one of these common ingredients.  No.  Wait.  That’s what Cadie did with RLR Laundry Treatment.  It took a good bit of digging, but it seems that the consensus is that RLR is nothing more than sodium carbonate/washing soda/soda ash.  In my quest for defunking my diapers I saw RLR as being a good way of getting rid of ammonia stink, so I investigated it.  Now if I get the urge to try it, I know I can just dump a bunch of washing soda in my machine and eliminate that as a wonder fix.

Meanwhile, I am going to go back to actually using my homemade detergent on my diapers with a hot rinse and “rock a soak” once a month.  I did it for my last diaper load and the smell is much less, erm, rockin.

Gloria’s Newest Dresses

In my quest to come up with a long sleeved dress for Gloria for the chilly weather, I came across a tutorial for a short sleeved peasant shirt.  I made a short sleeved one, then a long sleeved one, then another long sleeved one that was a bit too narrow, so I turned it into a dress for Little Miss Kinley Jo, the daughter of one of Michael’s co-workers, who is about 18 months younger than Gloria.  This is how it turned out.

The fabric is “patchwork” so, no, I didn’t sew a bazillion squares together to make this.  It was in the remnants bin at Wal-mart and looked fallish. 

After that, I took 2 yards of fabric that was originally intended to be part of my quilt that Mom made us.  It just didn’t quite fit in right with the other fabrics I had selected so we left it out.  I basically did the same thing with this one I did with Kinley’s.  I just did the sleeves a little differently and added about 5.75 yards of eyelet lace to the bottom tier and sleeves.  Gloria sees it and asks to put it on so she can “dance her dress.”  She has learned to twirl in it!

And to get a better idea of just how much fabric is around the bottom:

It hasn’t been washed yet.  It probably won’t ever stand up like this again!

Then this little girl from church showed up in a short sleeved peasant dress much like this next one.  I picked out some fabric that looked fallish and did long sleeves and this is what turned out.

It looks much cuter on the toddler than in the picture.  She’ll be wearing it tomorrow for Thanksgiving and I will try to get a good action shot of her filling it up.

And lastly, I fell in love with this Christmas fabric.  By the time I had decided exactly which fabric to pair it up with, it was time to feed the toddlers and get them in bed for a nap, so I did a really quick guestimation of how much of each fabric I wanted.  With the odd amounts I had cut, the dress practically made itself.  It’s hard to tell from the picture, but the fabric with red on green had a bit of metallic gold thread in the design that gives it a bit of sparkle.  I haven’t tried it on her with the red ribbon around the waist yet.  It may be too thin, but I sure like the way it looks on the hanger.

I have one last style kicking around in my head that I would like to sew up this season in a fabric I saw while picking out the Christmas fabric.  Then, I promise, I’ll be done with dresses.  Until summer.

Today’s Project: Bib Pants and Scaling the Stairs

  So the laundry’s not done and the floor still needs mopping, but I made DANIEL something today.  Gloria always gets cute little dresses and the like while I cringe at the thought of all the pieces to make a boy’s outfit.  I pulled out my Kwik Sew: Sewing For Toddlers book and got seriously busy with some fabric I had on hand.  It wasn’t quite as difficult as I had feared.  I may even attempt button holes tomorrow.

You’ll have to look past the giant diaper pins I used to secure it to him.  I felt the need to check the size on him before I went to the trouble of buttons or snaps.

First a sweet picture.

This one shows the outfit pretty well.

This one shows it even better, but Daniel doesn’t look too thrilled about modeling it. 

This one is not so much about the outfit though.

This next one made me remember another picture I once took.

The one on the left is Daniel.  The one on the right is Gloria!

Then Daniel decided to scale the stairs for the first time.  All of them!

A quick break at the top and then he was off again!

My babies are just growing up so fast!  I’d better cut out that pattern in the next size up.

Gloria’s Woolies by Grandma

So for anyone who doesn’t yet know, my mother (aka Grandma) crochets some lovely wool diaper covers for both of  my babies.  I had a photo-shoot with Gloria earlier today and got 3 different capris captured.  As I take more pictures, I will add them here as well as make Daniel his own special post.

Raspberry Ruffles

Watermelon wonderfulness (I dyed the yarn!)

Remember that Rainbow yarn I dyed? 

Here it is all worked up!

Here it is…

This is the dress I was working on while the kiddos fell asleep.  I think I did pretty well without a pattern.  There are a couple of little things I would change the next time around though.  I learned a lot!

She wanted the camera in the last one.