Fun with Fabric a la Microwaved Mesh

Sewing before the wedding appears to have reawakened my fabric fetish.....

While shopping for fabric for Gabriela's dress I discovered that one could purchase plain old cheap as chips stretch mesh & crinkle, wrinkle or crush it  themselves at home so that it would hold it's crinkles pretty much permanantly. This appealed to my experimental nature.

That I discovered a pattern that I rather liked at the time which would work well with a crinkled mesh fabric seemed to me to be further indication that I should start doing a little sewing again.

Last week I got to play with step one of the process.

Essentially there are a couple of options for getting the çrinkle/wrinkle/crush look depending on how you want the finished look.

Either you pull the dampened fabric up into little bunches & put rubber bands around them - or you gather each end in, pull it into a long taut length & twist it until it twists back onto itself ....then you put your bundle in the microwave with a cup of water for 20 minutes, checking at 5 minute intervals.

I went for the little bunches in rubber bands method, figuring it would give me a random creased look that I quite like. It was certainly time intensive putting al those rubber bands on a 2 meter length of fabric.

After removing from the microwave you have to let the fabric remain bunched up over night. This wasn't the easiest part for me as I was dying to see what the effect looked like. Somehow I managed to resist though & waited until the next day to unfold it. I loved the overall effect, but unfortunately I had been a little too 'exact' in the banding up of  my bunches making sure the fabric was all tucked in & it had caused peaks in the fabric where the centre of each bunch had been.

I couldn't see me wanting little pointy bit's sticking out all over the top I intend making, especially if any of them ended up over the bust area,  so it was back to the drawing board.

Not being to thrilled at the prospect of  spending an hour or so putting rubber bands in again I just dampened the fabric & went for the twist method....& was far happier with the results. Next step is to sew it up into something wearable.