Airship Project: Still the petticoat

I have discovered a new and very deep respect for all those ladies who make or have made tutus and dance skirts for ballet companies. Ladies, chapeau.

So, netting ... yeah ..... *sigh*

Let's start with the good things about netting:

1) The clips I bought for the satin work like a dream for netting. You can even catch the gathering thread under them instead of trying to wrap it around a pin (because pins, FYI, have a tendency to just fall out of netting).
2) Netting is self-gathering. Run a long gathering stitch across the top of a strip, and you'll find it's gathered itself up very nicely by the time you get to the end. Note: this does mean that you need to leave a very long thread tail at the start of the line just in case you need to take some of that gathering out.

And then there's the not-so-good things about netting:

1) It loves everything. As in, wants to hold it, squeeze it and call it George. And I do mean everything - fabric, thread, your clothing, other strips of netting (oh, it LOVES these!), random pieces of paper - nothing is beyond its loving reach. My personal favourite (not!) is when it grabs the thread coming down out of the machine to the needle and pulls it under said needle so it gets stitched to the fabric, thus creating a thread-based negative feedback loop that immediately locks up your machine and sends you in search of the nearest alcohol-based beverage. My only consolation is that the wig is in another room completely (but I'm only half-convinced that I won't get up one morning to find the netting curled up happily around its newest platinum blonde acquisition).
2) My little well o' sewing is not nearly large enough to handle multiple long pieces of netting.
3) Netting strips, when sewn together, are quite difficult to fold up into orderly stacks (see previous post for a photo of said orderly stack). I resorted to gathering them into piles and placing them in different spots so I'd know which length was where. My well o' sewing now looks like a Spielberg early experiment in special effects:


Yep, it exploded.

Yeah ... I recommend cider for this. Right now I'm drinking the Woodchuck Summer. It's got blueberries! :)