Tutu

Littles has been taking dance classes once a week for the past year. She loves them! She does ballet and just started tap last month. When Hubby took her to the dance store to get tap shoes, she spied some tutus... and has been asking for one ever since. So I decided to sew one up for her as an early Christmas present.

I had found some tutu sewing directions at Joann's a while back -- they have little sheets in the store with interesting project suggestions on them. I used that as a starting point, but ended up modifying it slightly to suit my preferences. I should have taken pictures as I went to do this post tutorial-style, but, well, I didn't. So I'll try to describe in words instead.

I used shiny tulle from Joann's in two different shades of pink. I cut strips lengthwise, from selvage to selvage, that were 12", 14", 20", and 24". (The original directions called for another strip 28" wide, but I thought that might make it a little long for Littles.) So, with the two different colors, I ended up with eight pieces of tulle.

I folded them in half, so now I had pieces that were 6", 7", 10", and 12" in height. Then I layered them from tallest to shortest, alternating the two colors. This was a huge pain! Tulle is not the easiest material to work with. I ended up taking one of the 12" tall folded pieces and laying it down and pinning it. Then I took the other 12" tall folded piece, laid it carefully on top, and made sure that the fold was reasonably straight. Then I took out the pins on the first piece to pin through both pieces. And so on, until I had all the pieces layered.

I put in some more pins to hold the layers together and did a basting seam about an inch from the fold. A basting seam is just a very loose seam that is designed to hold the pieces together temporarily. On my machine, I set the thread tension to 0 (as loose as possible) and the stitch length to 4 (as long as possible) to baste. It was a little hard to sew and so my basting seam ended up kinda crooked, but that was fine, since it was only temporary.

Then I gathered the tulle pieces to match Littles' waist. This was easy to do with the basting seam. I just pulled on one of the pieces of thread and that gathered the fabric right up. I kept pulling until it was the right length, then redistributed the tulle evenly along the basting seam.

At that point, it was time to add a ribbon for the waist. I used 2 yards of 1.5" grosgrain ribbon. I centered the tulle on the ribbon (since the ribbon was much longer than the gathered tulle) and pinned down the edges of the tulle. Then I added a bunch more pins in between to keep it in the right place. Finally, I sewed a seam down the middle of the ribbon. The original instructions called for folding the ribbon over the gathered tulle and sewing it again, but I liked the way it looked with the ribbon at the back. To finish it off, I removed the original basting seam.

It might sound complicated, but it was pretty easy, aside from working with the tulle! Here's the finished product...

From the back:

Close up showing the gathered tulle and how it is sewed to the ribbon:

Littles doesn't usually have dance class during school breaks, but she had a special make-up class this Thursday, so I gave her the tutu in time to wear it for class. She didn't take it off the rest of the day :)

I don't love the way it turned out. I made the waist a little too big. And it's very hard to tie the ribbon tight enough so that there isn't a big gaping hole on the back. I may experiment with adding some elastic on the waist to see if I can help with both problems. But certainly, it works well enough for now!