Rainbow TuTu… No Sewing Necessary!

So, there are some things in life I find easy and relaxing, like reading or watching movies…  Sewing…  Well sewing is unfortunately not one of those things – besides trying to sew a pair of shorts for my brother when I was 10 or so (and failing pretty terribly) I have had no inclination to do it since…  However when I saw this gorgeous cute tutu idea on Kayla Aimee’s blog I thought I should give it a good try – seeing how the girls are so into wearing skirts all the time…

After getting Seth to work out the measurements of the material into our cm/metres and factoring in that we probably wouldn’t find it in reams as you do in America, we set off to the material shop to buy 3.5m of 1m wide tule/netting/anything we thought would work and not run…  When we got there we realised it was measured in 1.5m widths and all our calculations were wrong, so I (badly) did the maths in my head and rounded it to 3m to make a full skirt (FYI I should have failed maths…  So maybe do the calc for yourself too)  We ended up with this…

Ok, so I went over board with the material…  I bought enough for 6 skirts because

1. I didn’t want the girls fighting over them and

2. I had 6 head bands that I bought for this purpose – might as well get it all done and dusted while I still have the enthusiasm…

In order to do this you need to measure how long you want the skirt to be on your daughters leg and double it.  So we used 50cm, and cut a piece of cardboard into a 50cm by 15 cm strip.  Initially we used this to cut it in both length and width, but that got tedious and we found that folding the width over into 3 gave the perfect result most of the time – whose going to know the difference anyway?!

Thanks to my Mom who is a real sucker for punishment and who helped me to work this all out.  Without her this would have taken forever.  So we cut, and we cut, and we cut, and we cut, and we cut, and we cut, and we cut…  You get the picture…  By this point we realised we would only have time to make 2 skirts that would unfortunately both be the same (Originally I thought I would do each of the girls a different type of rainbow, one light and one dark – but now they both got dark…)

If you are wondering…  The picture on the right is in fact a pre ordered pile of material, perfectly in the rainbow order…  Don’t judge me.

Then the tying started, it’s important to tie it in the middle of the material and the looser you make the knots means less that you have to put on the band – apparently.  (My thought on this – after letting 2 toddlers wear it for a full day now – is that the more the merrier because they will pull it tight for you and then there are gaps in the band at the top anyway, so you might as well pre-empt the problem by tying on as many as you have.)

And now for the final product…

Oops, ok here is the real final product…