Moneta II: (Re)covering a botched hem

Taken at the Botanical Gardens, just before we left Dublin

I had all kinds of trouble attaching clear elastic to the waistline of my first Moneta. I got some great tips in response to my plea for assistance on tackling clear elastic and recently decided that enough time had elapsed for me to give it another go. I bought this bamboo jersey at Hickey’s in Dublin when I spotted it on sale several weeks ago, and managed to finish up the Moneta before we left for Shanghai. The jersey is quite thin and has a strong tendency to roll up at the edges – which contributed to things going a bit crazy at the hemline…

I used a twin needle around the sleeve cuffs and neckline before working on the hem, so luckily those were already finished before disaster struck: the needles kept chewing up the hem and sucking it into the needle plate. I think this was down to a combination of bad fabric management on my part and having the tension a touch off (though it had seemed ok on the neckline!). Then, when I was trying to straighten things out, I hit a pin and shattered the twin needle. Whoops…

So, I managed to make a complete mess of the hem – it was really puckered and the back of the stitching was all kinds of odd. I didn’t want to cut the fabric and lose the length though, so instead I scouted out some lovely stretch lace from a haberdashery in the Powerscourt Centre, A Rubanesque. She didn’t have enough of the lace I’d picked out left in stock, so instead she suggested cutting this really wide one in half, which worked perfectly for making a nice wide band of lace.

I hand stitched the lace on to make sure I moulded it around the skirt without puckering and so that it covered the hem evenly along the bottom. Here’s a closer photo of the lace being stitched on – and the ‘right’ side of the hem pre-lace:

Ooof…

It feels like cheating a bit to basically put a band aid over what is a truly disastrous hem, but I quite like how it turned out! I’m not sure how I could have rescued it otherwise, without cutting up the skirt and re-doing the hem with a new twin needle. As it is, I really like this dress and have already worn it several times. The bamboo jersey is a lovely bright blue and is really, really soft, and the lace adds something a little delicate to what would have been a very simple dress.

Have you ever done an emergency patch-up or patch-over on a sewing project? How did it turn out?

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