Stain-covering ruffles

i can’t believe it…i’d almost finished translating this long post, which i’d spent quite a bit of time on…and firefox went nuts and i lost it. i’m trying to suppress all the swearing i’d like to do (mostly because i’m nursing my little guy as i type this) and am re-doing it, but with much fewer words!! so, i’d already written about how one of my daughter’s white school t-shirts got stained. i know, you can’t tell from this photo, but they are definitely there!

i was inspired by the many ruffle ideas i’d seen online, such as here and here and i sort of put those together with this idea. but what fabric to use for the ruffles? i fished around in my mega bags of scraps and found:

yes, i confess that those were indeed my undies, which were destroyed once and for all when i wore them during my last pregnancy. so, i ironed them and cut them into strips about 1.5 cm wide.

i laid them out on the shirt to create the design i wanted, trying to cover the stains.

and then i drew on the design with a water soluble pen.

i forgot to take pictures of this part, just when i made the flowers. sew a basting stitch down the center of the whole strip (not on the side, like in these pictures), knotting at only one end.

then you slide the strip along the thread to create the ruffles.

then i started pinning the ruffles along the design. i folded the ends of the strips under.

i sewed the ruffles on by hand with a backstitch, even though you can do it by machine. after it’s all sewn on, you can pull out the basting stitches.

then the flowers. i used one strip for each flower using the same method as for the ruffles, but now sewing the basting stitch along one side of the strip, not at the center. (now you can look at the pictures above!) then wrap the ruffle around itself and sew the bottom part of it together. (i used the same thread as for the basting without cutting it off, and then used it again to sew the flower onto the shirt.)

and there’s your flower!

you sew it onto the shirt…

…and there you have it!

no more stains visible and a very happy little girl! (although she actually was already happy before the picture, thanks to the chocolate ice cream daddy got her…)

however i discovered an unfortunate fact. it seems that you can’t ever wash a garment embellished in this manner. look what happened to my poor flowers and ruffles! i’ll have to try to sort it out with the iron. we’ll see what happens!

i just realized that one time i created undies for my daughter from one of my old t-shirts, and now i made a t-shirt for my daughter with some of my old undies. oh, the irony of it!