Party Time with Tulle! - Simplicity 8353

Tulle is great for more than just fluffy skirts! As decorator fabric, it makes a big impact for a little money. 

At Amazon you can buy a 40 yard bolt of tulle in 20 different colors for $9,99 with free shipping!!

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And I am honor bond to tell you I will get a tiny percent if you use this link to buy this tulle. 

But, truly, this is the very tulle I used!

I learned about this Amazon program from my wonderful Santa Barbara sewing and blogging friend, Ana Sullivan. She and I have made a pact to blog once a week. We both have been finding it challenging to keep a blog going, so we are now blogging buddies keeping an eye on each other.

Here is a link to her blog The Lost Apron. If is full of tips and projects for Moms and kids. She is also currently developing kits with projects to teach sewing. Stay tuned!

But, back to this fun pattern and some sewing help for how to wrangle a lot of tulle and deal with pressing those felt appliqués on a thin layer of tulle.

Whenever possible, I leave the tulle on the bolt for as long as possible. The skirt for the table cover and chair cover use the full width of the tulle for each panel. So, instead of cutting around a paper pattern, I roll the tulle out still folded in fourths from the bolt. Then measure and cut the lengths needed through all the layers. A rotary cutter is easier and makes the edges much smoother.

I, also, keep all sorts of tallies so I don't loose track of how many I've cut or sewn. It is such a pain to try and count giant piles of tulle things.

So, these huge tulle pom poms are pretty popular right now. You can find tutorials to make them on line, but these tutorial have you use that tulle on a spool and wind it around a piece of cardboard ... like you would make a yarn pom pom ... tedious.

I figured out how to make them with just a few widths of tulle cut to specific lengths and gathered in the center ... faster and cheaper!!

The table cover can be a monster to sew, at least at the last stage ... reminiscent of the tulle skirts I have made. READ OLD BLOG
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​But, here is how I assembled it. Just go step by step and it isn't too bad. First prepare the top, it is backed with felt for support. Join all the panels for the skirt, run a machine gathering stitch, then gather and sewn to the assembled side piece.

The tulle skirt is actually sandwiched between the outer fabric and the felt backing of the side piece for a very clean finish. You can see this is starting to get big.

At this point the side piece with the tulle skirt can be pinned to the top.

To keep it clean while sewing, I keep the bulk of it in a large box on the floor next to my machine and just rotate the part that I'm sewing back into the box while pulling out the next section.
Tulle can be filled with static and all sorts of stuff (thread, small scraps, dust, etc) gets stuck to it. Spraying it with Static Guard is also a good idea. It will keep the tulle from sticking to you and everything else.

The chair cover skirt is dealt with the in the same manner.

One more tip I want to pass along is how to work with the iron on felt appliqués. I recommend using Heat'n Bond. The desired shapes are first traced on the paper backing, second the paper backing is ironed on to the felt then the shapes can be cut out, felt and paper together, after it cools off.
Peel the paper backing off. This exposes the heat activated adhesive.

Because the shapes are being pressed onto sheer fabric I use a sheet of baking parchment underneath the tulle fabric to keep the appliqués from sticking to everything else. For the large table cover, I covered a small piece of wood with muslin, then wrapped it in baking parchment so I could bring it over to the table where I had arranged all the butterflies onto the tulle. This could be done on the floor as well, if you don't have a table large enough. 

Don't even think about trying to bring the table cover to your ironing board. An ironing board is not large enough to properly arrange all those butterflies and it would be very, very frustrating because those pieces would keep shifting. I simply moved my little portable ironing board from butterfly to butterfly pressing as I went.

Hope you all have festive and happy parties and celebrations ... cheers!
Andrea