So who is up for some adventures in shirring land?

This dress of a dozen rectangles basically represents what I love about being able to sew.

I purchased a similar, but simpler, shirred dress from Uniqlo recently. Having not worn anything shirred since childhood, I realised rapidly that I loved it and wanted more. I loved the square neck. I loved the fitted but comfy bodice without having to do any actual fitting.

I was adamant that I could simply recreate my own version of the Uniqlo shirred dress but with a tiered skirt.

And, of course, fabric which was a million times better quality and more interesting.

And so, a short while of googling things like “sewing shirred dresses” later, this over the top wondrous beauty is where my vision has ended up.

And, I’m not gonna lie, I’m happy.

But, it also wasn’t all smooth sailing, so hold on tight and ride the waves with me!

Creating the pieces for my shirred square-neck dress

As you’ve probably assumed from the above, I didn’t use a pattern for this dress.

On the By Hand London instagram account, there is a permanent story about creating a shirred dress. From this story, I took the invaluable information that my bodice rectangle needed to be about 1.5 times the length of my bust measurement. I then used my RTW dress as the guide for the length I wanted to make my bodice.

The bodice was really the only part of my “pattern” for which I needed a starting measurement.

For my straps, I made them the width of the RTW dress, which I liked, and made them plenty long enough that I could adjust as needed.

For the skirt pieces, I just played with using the maximum amount of fabric that I had available to create three tiers of increasing volume.

So, all in all, it’s just a bunch of rectangles (11 rectangles plus four inseam pockets pieces, if I want to be precise!), but isn’t it fun to see where we can take some simple shapes?

Reversible double gauze

The fabric I’ve used is a wonderful reversible double gauze from Atelier Brunette. Each side of the two layers of gauze used to create the “double gauze” has a different sized gingham check on it.

This creates so many opportunities for playing with this contrast.

I had actually purchased this fabric intending to make a shirt, where I could use the alternate sized check for collar, lapel and cuff details.

But then when I decided I wanted a free flowing sun dress, the shirt plan flew out the window and I decided I would play with pattern using tiers instead.

Different idea, but still shows the potential of this interesting fabric.

And did it mention it is soft and light and breezy?

What can I say, I love this fabric!

Shirring problems

Now, this was my first time shirring, so I am not an expert at the topic.

But when I set out on my shirring journey, I found plenty of blog posts about how to do it (I particularly used this Seamwork one and this Closet Core one). If you’re looking for info about how to do shirring, I’d suggest starting with one of those.

What I saw less of when searching for help is what do you do when you’ve diligently read all instructions on blog posts and guides and your sewing machine still just gobbles the elastic thread in the bobbin into a big knotty mess?

So my shirring adventure went like this…

My first attempt at shirring actually worked out well! Amazing!! I sewed about three beautiful perfect rows of shirring across the top of my bodice and then…

Well, then, I realised that I had been placing the elastic on the wrong side!!!

The downside of this beautiful double-sided fabric is that you have to remind yourself which side you actually want to be the right side for each piece!

So I then unpicked it all and finally set out to start shirring again on the other side.

And then, even after about three hours worth of various attempts, my machine just would not do it anymore! If I hadn’t had the early success to prove to me that it could actually be done, I would have likely given up at this point. But I already knew it was possible.

The question was how????

All I was getting now that I was finally ready to sew on the correct side of my bodice fabric was thread nests! Elastic-y ones!!

When the swearing reached a crescendo in my sewing corner, I went to bed filled with sewing angst and decided to return to the problem another day. Which is always a good idea, but still feels like a defeat in the moment!

So in view of my less-than-stellar introduction to shirring I thought I would use this blog post to share what I learned shirring for the first time by setting out some things that worked for me without needing to play with the tension or settings on my sewing machine.

The first thing I realised was that my sewing machine really liked it better with a stitch length longer than is recommended on most of the “how to shirr” guides. I used 4.5 as my stitch length when shirring on this dress. Be aware, that a longer stitch length means that the fabric becomes “gathered” more, but for me, there was no issue using a 4.5 stitch length for shirring a bodice when the original bodice piece was 1.5 times my bust measurement.

Shirring troubleshooting

The main thing I had to get the hang of in order to avoid ending up with knotty elastic messes each time I tried to start a row of elastic shirring was how to manually bring my elastic bobbin thread “upstairs” through the needle plate so that it was ready to sew.

This involved me finding a youtube video about shirring using my exact machine. The video gave me a piece of crucial information of which I had not been previously aware. It pointed out to me the precise point on my bobbin threading system which controls the tension of the bobbin thread.

Don’t worry, I’m not going to talk about adjusting it or anything complex like that, I don’t even know if my machine allows that. But once I realised exactly what was the essential point that my elastic thread needed to pass through, I could see that the main issue I was having was that the thick elastic thread kept slipping out and trying to bypass this point.

Thus, the knots.

So, through a bit of trial and error, I figured out that I needed to first set up my bobbin thread just like it was any normal thread and prepare to start normally. Then, I needed to hand turn the needle down just until my top thread wrapped around the bobbin thread.

At this point, I then had to go back down into the “bobbin zone” and unwind the elastic thread from the thread guide everywhere EXCEPT at the crucial point of tension which must be maintained.

Then I would use tweezers to pull the looped elastic thread upstairs and I would be ready to go!

It definitely took me a while to figure all this out. My sewing machine still retains an aura of magic for me. Understanding its inner functioning has never been an objective: there are so few things in this world that still seem like genuine magic, why mess with it?

But here I really did need to learn just enough to figure out how to get my bobbin thread up without losing the crucial tension point.

There were also a few more tangible things that I did to make things work.

First piece of advice here is that even if you’ve already done 10 rows of shirring, I found that starting each newly wound bobbin was like playing Russian roulette.

You just didn’t know what might happen.

So I started every single newly wound bobbin (and there will be A LOT – for me, each bobbin of hand wound elastic thread would only do 2-3 rows of shirring on my bodice) on a piece of scrap fabric . I would only move to my garment once it was sewing smoothly. Also, do all the obvious things that any old guide to shirring will tell you, like hand-turning the first few stitches.

Also, if things still just aren’t working and you don’t know why, you can always try re-winding your elastic thread. This worked for me a few times even though I swear I did nothing at all different when winding it on the second time around!

The other trick which worked, although I don’t know why, is that when I had to start with a new bobbin thread, I also re-threaded the top thread on my machine. There’s no reason I can see why that should have helped, but once I started to do this as a matter of course, the quantity of elastic nests appearing was really reduced.

I guess it’s just about eliminating possible points in the process where anything could be going slightly wrong.

Which brings me to another point.

I felt that on my sewing machine, its capacity to handle the elastic thread in the bobbin case was so precarious that if anything else went even slightly minimally wrong it simply slipped into “meltdown-I-will-now-just-chew-thread” mode.

In order to minimise the risk of this, I needed to eliminate any possible point where issues could be caused. So I replaced an already almost new needle with a brand new needle. This seemed to help.

Also, on my machine, when I am sewing with a spool of thread that is nearly empty, it does not spin around smoothly but can move in a bit of a jolty or jerky way. I saw that this was happening so I also switched to using a brand new top thread which moved perfectly smoothly. This is also seemed to do the trick during a moment of knotty mess.

And voila!

I’m no expert. Nor did I use any form of scientific method. So, I don’t really know which one of those above tips worked and which ones didn’t.

But I did learn that I need to approach shirring with patience, be willing to walk away for a while and be grateful for each row of shirring that did work!

And, given how much I do love this dress, I have to say that I think it was very much worth it!!