Saturday, August 1, 2009

My Favorite Girl is 9 Today!

I can hardly believe that my firstborn child is 9 years old. Time has gone so fast. It has been quite an exciting ride. She is such a blessing from God and I am so thankful to have her!


She decided on a ballerina princess party for our extended family gathering. On Monday she asked me to make her a tutu to go with the theme. Of course I said I would. Armed with Joann's coupons we went to purchase pink and purple tulle. My original idea was to make the no sew version. But time became and issue and I decided that I could sew them up faster than I could cut 100's of strips (the plan was to make 3 tutus-one for her and her 2 and 5 year old girl cousins) and tie them on to the elastic. I was right. I was able to make each tutu in about an hour.


The skirts for my daughter and my 5 year old niece (not pictured) were made of about 4 yards of both pink and purple. The skirt for the 2 year old was about 2 1/2 yards each of pink and purple. I cut the tulle different for the 2 year old's skirt and I didn't like it as much so I will give directions for how I made the skirts for the older two. Construction methods were the same for all three skirts.

Tutu Tutorial

1. I cut the tulle in half lengthwise and then in half lengthwise again so I had 4 long strips of pink tulle and 4 long strips of purple tulle.

2. I stacked all the tulle on top of each other. I put all the pink on top of the purple for one skirt and then all the purple on top of the pink for the other. I found that the best thing was to pin the edge that I was going to sew together. It was easier to get the edges together before going to my machine.

3. I put my binder that clean finishes both edges and makes a 3/8" binding on my coverstitch machine. I used 1 1/2" strips of satin to bind one long edge. I decided on binding the edge to keep the tulle from scratching the girls.


The edge looked like this when finished.


4. I sewed a line of stitching about 3/4" under the binding. This became my casing for elastic.

5. Half inch elastic was threaded through the casing.

6. Lastly, I serged the sides to close up the skirt.

My daughter and her cousins loved the tutus. They were quite the hit.

Thank you so much for stopping by. Have a great day!

Until next time...

1 comment:

Thank you so much for taking the time to comment. I will try to reply back to you if at all possible. Have a great day!