[April Henry]

I usually don’t have an issue with the elastic twisting because I always stitch in the back seam to hold it in place. However, I always seem to have an issue with the symmetry of gathering around the casing. It will slide and look unbalanced. I added the elastic waistband trick (http://www.oliverands.com/blog/2009/06/elastic-waistband-trick.html), but the gathering is still shifty. (See photo below) The casing was just a hair over 3/4 inches wide for 3/4 inch elastic.

See how it’s more gathered at the waistband on one side… Any suggestions or other tips? Can I just stitch the elastic in place at quarter intervals?

[sews4kla]

Stitching the waistband at quarter intervals sounds good to me. But before you stitch stretch out the waistband and distribute the gathers as desired, put pins in the locations where you want to stitch. Stitching in the ditches (side seams, center back seam) is a great place to start because the stitches are harder to see. Then if gathering is still moving around too much you could pick other places to stitch. The skirt is very cute and I think I need to keep my eyes peeled for vintage linens.

[April Henry]

That’s kind of what I was thinking, too. It only has the back center seam (already stitched there), but I will just carefully sew at the side seams and hope it makes a difference.

It sounds so basic, I was just thinking there had to be a fancy technique! hahaha!

[Liesl Gibson]

That makes sense to me too. Let us know how it works out, ok?

[sews4kla]

I found this method for adding elastic to clothing. I thought it might work with the lazy days skirt. It looks promising but, there may be too much fabric that has to be gathered for this method. It involves sewing the elastic into a circle and serging or zig-zagging it to the garment (while stretching elastic so that it lies flat on the garment waist).

http://off-the-cuff-style.blogspot.com/search/label/Sewing%20Notions

Here’s the link please scroll down until you see the how to for elastic waist.

[Emily]

What I’ve done in the past to fix shifting gathers is to run a line of stitching all the way around the waist through the middle of the elastic. What I did was stretch the elastic (already in the casing) far enough that the fabric layed flat, then stitched down the middle of the elastic. I held one hand behind the presser foot and one hand in front so that there wasn’t a lot of pressure or torque on the needle (as there would be if you were only stretching the fabric you were feeding in from the front) and guided the fabric through. When I let go of the fabric, the elastic scrunched back up and the skirt had even gathers.

[sews4kla]

Oops, I forgot to add a final step after method described in the link above . Stretching fabric and elastic sew through right side of skirt, and elastic/fabric. This will topstitch the wastband and look more like the orginal skirt casing.

Different methods for diffenent fabric and elastic weights. It’s great to have a short list of references.