Birthday Tutu

With Christmas now over I want to get a head start on some hand made presents for Sienna's birthday.  Last year I made her a Rag Quilt  for Sienna's birthday which I loved making and she loved it and then I made a little sausage dog for her however I made it after her birthday as I got the sewing bug.

She turns 9 on the 27th February which is basically two months away but once school starts up again it's all systems go.  Whenever we visit a friend of ours Sienna is always putting on their tutu's and doing a dance or singing with her friend so I thought I would make one for her birthday.  There are plenty of tutorials on Pinterest for "no sew tutu" and you'll come up with heaps of instructions.

You can either use ribbon like I did for the waist band or get thick elastic and sew it together to make a circle.  Since I was going with the whole "no sew" theme I opted for pink ribbon for the waist band and purple and pink tulle which I bought from Spotlight and lucky for me it was 30% off day.  I bought 2 metres of pink and 2 metres of purple and the tulle was 150 cm wide.  If you were making it for little toddlers you could make the tutu shorter and get 2 out of this amount of fabric due to the length.  Remember your strip of fabric when cut will be halved again in the doubling over effect so whatever length you want your tutu the fabric strips have to be twice that length (hope that makes sense).

This is so easy and the whole thing took about an hour but it can be done in less time.  I tied the ribbon around a dining chair and then cut stripes of tulle about 4 inches wide using my patchwork mat, ruler and rotary cutter so that process was easy.  There are great instructions on how to cut lengths by wrapping it around some cardboard and these instructions are on Pinterest as well under the "no sew tutu". 

My colour theme was a strip of pink then a strip of purple, then repeat all the way around and it's as easy as that.  I hung it up on the clothesline to take a photo of it and noticed Sienna's bike from Santa is the same colours which are so pretty.

Here's the photos of my work in progress with the ribbon tied around the dining chair so I could use two hands to loop the fabric through.

Seriously this is so cute and so easy and I only wish Pinterest was around when my daughter was a little toddler.

My next project for the birthday is making this wall mobile of hearts which is one of Sienna's favourite shapes.  It's a foreign blog so I have translated it into English and put the link it however if it doesn't link with the translation just change it yourself.  Stay tuned for progress on that in a couple of weeks time.  I popped into the Quilt Store today to pick up some little squares of fabric.