Macaron Peplum: Part 1

Today’s blog post should get me one step closer to catching you guys up on what I did over the weekend with my Macaron dress hack.

I am head-over-heels in love with peplums.  I’m not sure you all feel the peplum love like me, which I should state is “second” over my love of bows; but I think they’re the bees knees.

What’s kinda crummy is that I don’t think peplums technically work for me with all of my hippy-hips and thick thighs. But I’m not letting that stop me since I have in my head that the Macaron needs a peplum.

*Calming down now*

In my research and scheming of how to go about making a peplum, I ran into a mini road block.  All of the peplum patterns I’ve seen have been circles (cut on the fold in a circular shape).  This lends itself great to having a flared hem yet flat & cinched waist.

The problem with this is that I’m using a piece of lace as my peplum which has a lovely scalloped border.  What this all means is that my peplum has to be a giant rectangle  instead of a curved peplum, since I’d loose the scalloped border that way.

As a result, I decided to pleat the ruffle in such a way that I get maximum floof at the hem of the peplum, while trying to minimize my waist.

Math:

3″ of the lace, lying flat at the two center front edges
+
3/4″ pleat (uses up 1.5″ of fabric)
+
1.5″ gap (before starting the next pleat

This is what I was able to come up with.  I spent nearly all of my night on Friday trying to come up with the perfect number of pleats vs. spaces to maximize the small amount of fabric I had left.  I should note that I don’t even have 2 inches of the scalloped border left to use; I was cutting things that close!

I should mention, I was really hoping that I would have some lace scalloped border left over so I could apply it to the hem of my skirt, but it wasn’t meant to be I guess….

This is my peplum piece.  The lace was around 48″ long and my cranberry silk crepe was only 44″ long.  What I ended up doing was sewing a 6″ section onto the silk crepe with a french seam.  Luckily the seam is on the underlining, and with the pleats you’ll never end up knowing its there.

I decided that I was going to try out my new silk pins on my peplum, since I didn’t have enough of my flat headed daily pins.

I bought these pins from Sunni’s online shop, and while they seem just as thick as my normal pins, they really *hold* the silk well and are sharp enough that they don’t leave any marks.  After using them I was surprised how much I liked these pins.  :)  (I doubted the thickness of these pins for my silk crepe & lace).

I use lots of pins as you can see.  With how wiggly silk crepe gets I wanted to ensure I had the lace and silk aligned *just so* in preparation of my hand basting.

The first thing I did was to run a line of basting at the top of the peplum (in black… so it’s hard to see).

And then I ran another line of basting above all of the scallops.

And finally, there’s a third line of basting stitches in the scallops themselves, which is also terribly hard to see (if not impossible to see).

Here’s a mega detail shot, but it’s still terribly hard to see my basting ,besides the line in silver thread.

Luckily enough, I took a shot of the wrong side of the peplum:

Well, that’s really all I have to share at the moment.  I’d keep going with the rest of the construction of the peplum, but I have even more photos of that, so I figured I’d share the rest tomorrow.

In: Sewing

Tags: Lace Macaron peplum Silk Fabric