Purple tutu

Ages ago, I got a bunch of pink and purple tulle to make tutus for Littles. I sewed a pink tutu way back in December, and it was enough of a pain that I wasn't exactly jumping to sew the purple one. But Littles found the purple tulle in my sewing room one day, and has been begging me to make her a purple tutu. And I can't turn down my little girl :)

I didn't love the way that the pink tutu turned out, so for this one, I used these instructions from fabric.com. The one slight modification I made was that rather than sewing the layers of tulle to a piece of scrap ribbon one at a time, I sewed them all together, using a basting stitch (long thread length/loose tension), and then gathered them together.

I also had Littles "help" me with this project, which she absolutely loved. Just simple stuff like holding the tulle while I cut it.

The end result is... better. But still not great. Since I suspect I'll be making a tutu again (Littles loves to dance), here are the modifications I would make:

1. Don't wait for your overeager preschooler to find the neatly folded tulle in your sewing room. She will unfold it all, making it much harder to cut later! The Joann's cutting counter gave me the tulle folded in half, so all I would have had to do is cut along the foldline... had Littles not gotten to it first :)
2. Possibly use just 3 layers of tulle for a child's tutu, rather than 4. It's pretty poofy.
3. You typically don't backstitch when doing a basting seam, but it's very helpful to backstitch one side of the basting seam holding the layers together. Then you can gather from the other side, without worrying about the gathered fabric slipping off the end.
4. Don't cut the waistband ribbon to length. Leave a lot of extra. You can cut it down to the right length when you fold it over. (With this one, I did cut it to length plus a little extra, and it ended up being way too short so I had to fold over part of the tutu itself. It looks a little funny.)
5. When sewing the waistband ribbon to the tulle, sew with the tulle up, the ribbon down. I didn't do this, and accidentally caught lower pieces of the tulle in my stitching a couple of times because I couldn't see it.

That said, I do like this method a lot. And Littles loves the results, which is all that really matters!