It's a Learning Process: Gathering Silk

Wherein Quilting Bibliophagist works on a First Communion dress for her Granddaughter and records her trials and tribulation as she learns new skills, new techniques, and boldly goes where no quilter has gone before. (Cue theme music.)

Never having worked with silk before, I've been very careful to test everything, everything, on a sample before working on the actual dress.

Take gathering, for instance. Who would have thought that there would be so much difference between having the gathering line on the straight or crosswise grain of the fabric?

The sample in the upper part of the photo has the gathering line parallel with the selvage of the fabric. See how nice it looks? The bottom one has the gathers parallel with the crosswise grain. Lumpy-bumpy! I think it does that because this silk has tiny cord-like lines running through it in an east-west direction. Unless you're up close, you can't really see the lines because it's such a fine silk. But they're there and they stubbornly resist the gathering stitches. But when gathered in the other direction, they line up sweetly. To achieve this effect, I'm going to have to lay out my skirt pieces on the crosswise grain, rather than the straight grain. I'll feel like an anarchist if I do, but it just might save my sanity.

N.B. Posts do not reflect QB's current progress.