Faux Ribs for Faux Fur

Thanks to Els invaluable tutorial on making your own rib! Another costume character, another design problem, for the upcoming Seussical production. The director chose this purple faux fur with lurex. Horrors! I looked everywhere for a chunky rib that would match to make this bolero style work. I finally found a very thin crinkled raggy piece of jersey that was the right color, but not even close to the texture I wanted.

It’s sort of the opposite of Mary Beth’s bolero that has faux ribs in the fake fur for the cuffs.

Calculating how many ribs in Els’ precise equation was not really possible, so I decided to keep tucking until I had a block big enough to cut my pattern pieces out.

2 days later I was still making double needle pintucks. There was a lot of uneveness and twisting, the thread kept breaking, it was sort of a nightmare all by itself, before I even got up to my elbows in the flying faux fur.

Since this was for a costume, I didn’t worry about the crazy, wonky  nature of the pintucks. I kinda like the texture that it imparts to the rib.

My only concern was that this was taking far too long to do, and I had  to move things along a bit more quickly.

The solution was to piece together lengths to make up the needed parts  – easy enough to do if you just lay one tuck on top and topstitch over it.  It blended in with the tucks on the piece underneath. Thankfully I was  able to cobble together enough lengths to make the trim for both the  bolero collar and cuffs, as well as the top waistband of the skirt.

The folded over bands of faux rib look great.

I followed some instructions I found for fake fur sewing to cut and join the  seams, then stretched my rib bands to the body. All of the seams are sewn  with zigzag at the edge.

Dress rehearsals start soon – can’t wait to see how all of this turns out!