This is just about as much fun as a person can have for 30 bucks. If you don't have one of these for your machine, drop a few hints--Mother's Day is upon us. If one doesn't show up all gift wrapped nice and pretty, well , then buy yourself one on June 1st to celebrate the beginning of hurricane season.
I can tell you that you will easily spend an hour just fooling around with it. All those little geegaws and notches and screws all affect the size and placement of the ruffles. And it will gather two pieces of fabric together at once! Perfectly! Super Fast!
I should tear off about 20 muslin fabric strips, try out all the different settings, and label each sample so that next time I will immediately know how to set it up for perfect ruffles the first time. But I'm not going to. What's the point of having a toy like this if I can't play with it, huh?
I did actually make ruffles for the bloomers. The original pattern called for 5 rows of 1 inch gathered lace to be sewn across the fanny. Perfect excuse to use a ruffler attachment, right? Since I wanted my ruffles to finish about 1 inch, I tore strips 2 inches wide across the width of the fabric. Then I narrow hemmed each long edge. Then the ruffling began! See?
Five minutes later I had this:
Oh wow. I can tell already that I'm having a very ruffly summer. I'm gonna put these on everything!
One note about this pattern, though. The instructions said to stitch the gathers on the marked stitching lines. After 30 minutes of re-reading the instructions and looking at the back bloomer pattern piece (I'm being extra careful these days, due to the Huge Boo Boo I made on Baby Love), I finally realized that there were not any stitching lines indicated on the pattern piece. This is in fact a mistake on the pattern and instructions. I just thought I would mention it here so that if anyone else has this pattern they won't feel incompetent and stupid.
Rant Begins.
I will reiterate my position on this sort of thing--that if I have to pay 11 bucks for your pattern, I expect it to be free of mistakes. Especially if it has been in print almost 12 years. You've had time to correct it by now.
Rant Over.
So to help out others and make the world a more meaningful place, I drew a line on my bloomers myself--yes, I made this decision without any input from the experts--as to where to sew on the gathers. I decided to make the bottom row about 1/2 inch above the crotch curve on the back bloomer piece. And here's a picture of it, just for you (you'll have to click to really see it):
Hope this saves someone an hour of frustration. And have I said yet just how cute these bloomers are?
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