Shirred dress...er top?

I have been playing around with a new technique; shirring.  It took some experimenting to figure out how to get it to work correctly with my machine, but I think I've got it.  Now to write down the settings before I forget and have to start over again.

I read the instructions for this dress and wanted to give it a try. Despite what the link says, it is a shirred dress, not smocked. I would expect Martha Stewart to be more accurate, but whatever. The instructions were simple and straightforward so I decided to give it a go.

After much trial and error, I finally made the dress pictured below:


Yes, some of you might recognize the fabric.  It is the curtains from the canopy of her crib.  We had to take them down a while back because she was trying to pull them in to the crib and we were afraid she would get tangled up in them.  When Malcolm was a baby, one of our rabbits, Ripley, liked to hang out under the crib.  What we didn't realize until later was that she was chewing the bottom of one of the panels so there are little bunny chew holes in one of them.  Due to those two things, there isn't much we felt we could do with the curtains, so they became scrap/practice fabric for me.

As always, it was a learning process. One thing I learned is that at this size a couple of inches makes all the difference between a long dress and dress that fits more like a shirt. Despite my careful measuring, this is a little too short for Dorothy to wear alone as a dress. Luckily, I was planning to make some matching bloomers anyway. It will still be adorable, but it isn't a dress. I have some other modifications I want to test out too, so I think I'll try for a dress and also a long romper with flutter sleeves. I can picture it, so let's see if I can figure it out.

If you want to try this, it is really easy, but here are my tips:

1. I had to wind the elastic thread on the bobbin with a little tightness. Loosely winding it did not give me any gathering.

2. The longer the stitch, the more gathers I got, so I used a basting stitch to get the most fullness.

3. I had to turn my tension to almost the lowest possible setting. More tension resulted in the elastic showing through on the front of the dress.

4. I was afraid the elastic would try to pull out if I sewed first, then cut, so I used a piece of fabric one and a half times the circumference of Dorothy's chest and it came out great. Next time, I will go ahead and sew the fabric together before doing the shirring. My shirring lines in the back don't quite line up and it is driving me batty.