I’m continuing my experiments with bishop pleating.  I really want to keep the French Seams, because I will be submitting a bishop dress for my SAGA artisan pin soon, and I’m pretty sure they want French seams.  I’m still waiting for my new set of pleating needles to come in the mail, so I played around.

I’ve read about other methods of pleating.  One is to pleat one section at a time, then to make a faux French seam.  Another is to serge the armhole seams.  But I don’t think that method will be accepted for Artisan standards.  So what I did was to make the first pass on the French seam, wrong sides together.  Trim very close to the stitching, and run the piece through the pleater.

Fan the pleats out on a blocking board and line up the seams according to the guidelines.  Tie off the threads to the proper size.

Lift the bishop off the blocking board, one section at a time and pin out the rest of the French seam.  This involves pushing the seam area flat on each seam and pinning.  Roll back from each side until all seams are pinned.  Then stitch the second pass of the French seam on your machine, right over the pleating threads.

I’ll have pictures on this on a later post.