Me: "Do what?"
I had absolutely no idea what my friend was going on about but now I do! She gave me a metre of material, a reel of black elastic thread and an explanation! I had absolutely no idea what my friend was going on about but with a little research later, I now do!
All the info I found about shirring pointed to the following tips to achieve a good result:
1) Hand wind the bobbin with the elastic thread, without stretching it.
2) Use normal thread on the top.
3) Lower the tension on the machine.
4) Increase the stitch length.
5) Sew slowly and smooth the material as you go.
6) Sew the lines about 1cm apart.
7) Tie the ends of the elastic off at each end.
8) The finer the material the better the result.
The elastic thread doesn't come in many colours (my friend gave me black) but this doesn't matter as you won't see it on the front of the work. I lowered the tension by one and increased the stitch length by one. I couldn't choose the material as my friend had decided this material was ideal for the skirt she wanted it to become! Hand winding the bobbin was easy and one full bobbin did 4 metres of sewing. Smoothing the material wasn't as hard as I thought it was going to be. Once you'd shirred a few lines, you kind of develop a rhythm of your own!
The length of material was 148cm at the start. After shirring, it was about 62cm. They say in books that you need three times the amount of material to make a shirred item. Ours is not quite 3x but I reckon that's probably because the material is not that thin and so it probably didn't gather as much as it would have.
We live and learn!
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