Lettuce Edging ~ Sewing My Mom’s Shirt



My mom has ALS, so she can’t do very much. She’s in a wheel chair and can’t move her arms. Her birthday is coming up and I wanted to make her something special. Last year I made a quilt for her. A few months ago I helped her go through her storage room. She gave me a bunch of fabric, and one piece in particular, she told me that she had wanted to make a dress out of it. So remembering this, I decided to make her a shirt out of this fabric.


 I used Simplicity pattern #1916, style E. My mom is about the same size as me, just a little bigger, so I made the shirt as thought I was making it for me and it ended up being a little big for me, which hopefully will be perfect for my mom. According to the size chart, I should be a size 12, which I cut the patterns to size 14. I could probably take it in about 2” for it to properly fit me, so when I make a shirt for myself I am going to use a smaller size because I want it to be snug.

It was really easy. It took me two evenings to make it. I always wanted to make something with lettuce edging because I had never done it before. All the books and blogs I’ve read don’t really explain clearly how to do it. I even went on youtube to find a tutorial and only found videos using sergers. I don’t have a serger. So I went ahead and tried it with my sewing machine. I used my SINGER 9960. I set it on zigzag stitch, #9, 6.0, and 0.3.


It does take some practice because you have to stretch the fabric on both sides (continuously even) as it is feeding through. And you have to use stretchable fabric.
This is a photo before I’ve stretched it:

 

This is a photo while I am stretching it. (I am not stretching it in the back yet because I had to use my other hand to hold the camera.)

 

So I would hold the back of the fabric with my left hand, and hold down with my finger of my right hand on the front of the fabric so I could glide it through the feed dogs. Then I stopped sewing, let go of the fabric, and stretched the next section.
And this is what the finished edge looks like.

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