All the Frills

Back in September, I decided it was time to make a new headdress. I'd been inspired by Elina's teaser photos of her frilled hood, and had wanted to make one anyway, so I set out to make it a reality.

It didn't work out as planned.

Though I had done considerable math, my linen strips still came up quite short after pleating. I also failed to account for the discrepancy between the curve required for the lowest layer versus the top layer, so the ends where not lining up properly. Not to mention that the linen I used, leftover from the lining of my pink cote, was really too heavy for this purpose.

A true shame, really, since the pleats were turning out quite lovely.

So I scrapped that idea.

Then I saw that Elina had a new set of frills inspired by a set created by Cathrin Åhlén. Thankfully, Cathrin posted her how-to on her blog!

Cathrin's premise for her lovely frills is that narrower bands would create frills so tight and small that starching was unnecessary. This seemed like a perfectly reasonable premise to me. But what threw me was when she stated that her strips measured about 6 meters all told. That's about 20 feet!

So I had to run an experiment to wrap my mind around needing that much length. I also wanted to see if the gauze linen I've had kicking around would work for this technique.

After following Cathrin's directions, I had a cute little frill length. And the clarification that nearly 20 feet of linen was not unreasonable.

The gauze proved difficult to work with as a long strip, since the open weave and narrow width made it susceptible to ripping. I had to remove and replace the fourth strip before I'd even finished hemming the 2nd. It would have been better to sew each individually first, then sew their ends together.

As I sewed along, using a small running stitch to make quick work of it, I got a bit frustrated by how wobbly my hem was. It wasn't terribly wobbly, but since I'd gone through the painstaking effort of cutting the gauze on grain (which is impossible to do on gauze linen without pulling threads as a guide (thanks again to Cathrin for the idea!)), it was irritating that my hem was not consistent.

I decided to just finish the frill and leave it as a single piece to add to other items, just as Cathrin and Elina had done. I used more of the gauze to bind the pleats, but the light weight linen isn't sturdy enough to straighten the frills. I tried some machine sewing to make the binding sturdier, but even with a zipper foot, it was too difficult to actually get a straight line. I decided to just leave it and experiment with basting into place on other things to find out if it was really necessary to do anything more with it.

I particularly liked the idea of attaching it to my huvet and wearing my hood over it. Which is probably not incredibly accurate, but....

Cute. But still not quite what I was intending. So it's back to the drawing board on the frilled hood, though this set will certainly tie me over in the meantime.