Ruffled Nappy Cover
Once I had made all the strips I thought I needed I began attaching them to the back piece of the diaper cover pattern. I started at the bottom of the bottom and worked my way up, overlapping the pieces as I went:
Hello stitchers!
I had a dream of a lovely ruffly nappy cover for my niece - reminiscent of the lovely frilly pants tennis players used to wear under their skirts - and so I decided to make one.
When I inherited my lovely Bernina sewing machine from my mum it came with all sorts of amazing attachments, one of which was a ruffler foot. A foot - that makes ruffles. So clearly part of this plan was about me being able to use the foot extensively and marvelling at the mechanical magic that ended up with beautifully event gathers.
I started off with a diaper cover pattern that I found online and then adapted it.
The pattern is very simple and easy to put together but the ruffles added a bit of complexity.
I made the ruffles by taking strips of fabric approximately 2.5" wide and folding them in half length ways so the folded edge would form the bottom of the ruffle and would be visible.
I used the ruffle foot to the gather these strips evenly along the whole length by sewing straight down the middle of each strip. I experiemented a bit with the depth and length of the gathers until I got the effect I was after.
I continued adding gathered pieces until I'd filled the back pattern piece. I actually ran out of red fabric towards the top so I added some of the curtain fabric that I'd made the matching dress out of and then topped it off with some ribbon to hide the top raw edge.
I then came to sew the back and front pieces together and then noticed my error - I wanted to catch the raw edges within the seam allowance for the leg holes but hadn't appreciated that they were elasticated (fairly obvious when you think about it) and now I had a load of ruffles which meant creating a channel for the elastic was going to be a bit tricky to say the least!
I eventually had to do some stratgic unpicking and freed up the edges of the ruffles enough to create a channel for the elastic. Once I had the elastic all sewn in I then hand stitched the edges of the ruffles down, turning them as I went so I had a nice clean edge.
A bit of a labour of love!
Once the whole thing was put together it looked completely awesome though!
It fitted beautifully and when worn with the matching dress was pretty super even if I say so myself. Here's the lady herself showing it off...
Trickiness: A bit ruffly
I have a ruffler foot on my machine so this was easy to do, but with this many ruffles it may take some time - ultimately an easy sew though
Facts and Stats!
Pictures
