A Gift a Day Gift Five: Dress Scarf

My oldest niece is currently in junior high.  I have problems figuring out what to get my two oldest nieces as they came into the family later in life (they are from my sister-in-law's husband's previous marriage) and I don't see them too often (because I have no social life *laugh*), so I end up wracking my brain on what to get the two of them.  Luckily my one niece is my daughter's age and they have a lot in common when it comes to likes, so I can figure her out to a point (I hope), but my oldest niece I have to really think on.

So, I finally decided to make her something that I would have liked at her age.  Something to spiffy up a normal outfit.  So, I decided to make her some dress scarves.

I found some different fabrics at the thrift stores earlier in the year for .50 and got them to do just this with.

This is the first fabric I chose to make a scarf out of.  It is shorter than what they recommend a dress scarf being for an adult (they recommend about 70" it seems.  This fabric is around 50" or so long), but I was able to knot it twice around my own neck to make a fancy knot, so I'm hoping it'll work out okay for her.

The fabric was 49" wide, so I cut it in half to make two scarves out of one length of fabric.  I'm not sure what I'll do with the second scarf with at this point...I'm thinking another gift for my daughter maybe, but I'm playing it by ear at this point.

I went with 1/4" double folded seams for this.  You can use a narrow seam foot on your sewing machine for things like this to try and sew right at the edge, but every time I've tried with something this light weight it just gets sucked into the sewing machine and I end up with a mess, so I decided to go with a larger seam allowance and figured it was worth it to not eat the material.

Note when working with sheer fabrics like this.  You can seem them start to fray right before your eyes.  Now, you can get some basically clear nail polish at the fabric store to stop this from happening, but I prefer to cut the fraying edges off (since I'm buying used material that in some cases is pretty frayed) and make everything nice and neat before I start to sew and just get it done as quickly as possible.  Also note that pins are necessary to hold the material in place but they fall out REALLY easy on material like this, so watch your pins and be prepared to get stuck once in a while from a pin that has come loose.


Total Cost of Gift:  .25 for the material as I used 1/2 for this project and about a quarter pint of blood from getting stuck with pins.  Well, okay I'm exaggerating, but I got stuck a lot *laugh*.

Total Time to Make Gift:  1 hour about as I kept getting dragged away to get snacks and things for the kids.