Knife Pleats

Okay, I freely admit, tho I can't say I like to, I was overthinking knife pleats. Especially with linen. It's easy to overthink something you have no experience with, so I've been trying all kinds of ways to make it easier or make it faster and realized a little while ago that I was actually making it harder, not easier. At any rate, it's easy to see the threads in linen. Actually, I'm sure it's easy to see the threads in most materials if you try, but that's beside the point.

Here's what I'm finding is the easiest way, eyeball the thread I'm trying to follow. I'm not kidding.

To make it a step easier, I would trace a line on the material where the ground of the pleat is supposed to be sewn as well as on the peak of the pleat that's supposed to be sewn to it, so I don't lose my threads as easily, but that's for the next row.

Needless to say, I thought this method would be the hard way to do this, but it actually isn't. No wonder there haven't really been good instructions for it, because other than sewing them down, there really isn't a method necessary for making them easier. The only thing you need to know is how large to make the folds, but that's pretty easy too. Period Pleats shows the folds. See the ground fabric with the folded pleat on top? Simply draw your line where the folded pleat should lay on the ground fabric and draw a line on the point of the folded pleat. Match those two lines and voila, sew them down with a backstitch or something else you prefer right on the top about a 1/16" in. Granted, this method *can* work with a sewing machine, but somehow handstitching feels better to me.

It's going to take a little while to get these done, but I think it'll be good by the time it is. Hopefully it's not too small, but as a test piece, I think it'll be okay and I think I can likely take the pleats I'm making now and sew them to a larger piece of material later without much difficulty, so it won't be wasted.

Funny how you go through all this stuff to make something easy, only to find the original method was the easiest. I'll post pics when I'm done tho.