I Love My New Ruffler Foot

We have one sewing machine and supplies store here in town, independently operated. I go there pretty frequently for sewing machine repair and servicing, and when I want to buy a new specialty presser foot.

Also, I hate them.

It's the kind of place where you can go in knowing exactly what you want--a buttonhole foot for your old-school Brother, say--and the employee will still make you feel like an idiot. You can't answer some specific question about the exact type of shank on your machine, perhaps, which lack of knowledge is somehow the catalyst for her making you feel like you barely have any business getting yourself dressed in the morning, much less operating a sewing machine. And the other employee, the one who would  know off the top of his head what your shank type is, is out for the morning and won't be in for three more hours. And that book that you can see right there, the one that would say exactly the type of shank on your machine, looking things up in that book isn't the job of the particular employee in front of you, nor are you permitted to use it. Oh, and they don't stock buttonhole feet, anyway, so they'd have to special-order it, which is the responsibility, perhaps, of some third employee, who's also not in the store at the moment.

Because I'm a big chicken, I've taken to forcing Matt to patronize this store for me. He says that they're really rude to him, too, but I don't care.

The absolute only redeeming quality to this store is the fact that, since I do have an older machine, all this rigamarole notwithstanding, I do invariably end up with the correct foot, including the correct shank type, for my Brother. If you've got an older machine, you'll know that can be tricky.

And that's how I came to own this fancy contraption, otherwise known as a ruffler foot:

It's wonderful. You set the gauges for how many ruffles you want per how many stitches, and how wide you want your ruffles, then you feed the fabric into the middle, and off you sew, ruffling happily away:

I bought it because I knew that I would be sewing mad ruffles for Sydney's rainbow fairy dress, and I did NOT want to gather every single huge layer by hand (nor could I, really, with a couple of the wonky fabrics that I chose). And while I still need to do a lot of playing around with my ruffler foot before I can do a really precise job using it, with muscle, and a lot of jiggering, and some blatant cussedness, those ruffles, they did get ruffled.