 that I am putting together for all of you. Last week in part one, we talked about darts. Today we're gonna talk all about pleats. And pleats are fantastic because they are, to me, very feminine, but they also create lots and lots of volume wherever you need more room. So the dress that I'm working on is this really old simplicity dress, but I love it because it has tons of pleats in the front and the back and the pleats start here and kind of come out from there. So it gives you wearing ease for your bust, but also design ease and wearing ease for your hips as well. So lots of fun with pleats. I'm gonna show you how I get perfect pleats in all my garments no matter where they are. Pleats can come like I'm doing now, they can come under the bust and kind of come up to create a room for the bust that way. They can start at your hip and go down for like a fit and flare skirt. You can have them in your sleeve for like a puffy sleeve. You can have them attached to the back for like a, think about like a men's shirt for back wearing ease, pleats are everywhere. So might as well take the time to learn how to do them perfectly each and every time because you're gonna be doing them a lot. So let's jump over to the tutorial. Okay, so here's a little roundup of what we are going to need. You will need a pattern obviously that includes some pleats. But so what you'll need here is pins. You'll need little scissors to cut into the fabric. You'll need a pen. This is the Clover Water Erasable Pen. So one end of it is your marking tool and then the other end of it is like another type of marker but this erases this blue end. Really super, super cool, especially because we are gonna end up having to draw on the fabric and on the right side of the fabric. So it's nice to have a tool that will undo that, that will erase that so you can't see it from the right side. And then you just need something with a straight edge. So I pulled out the hot hemmer. We are obviously gonna be pressing a lot. So I'm gonna need this anyways. So I thought that I would just use this as my straight edge but obviously you can use any type of ruler. Okay, so that's what you need. Here are what the darts look like on your, I'm sorry, the pleats look like on your pattern. So it literally says on here, pleat. Then there is a dotted line. There is a solid line and an arrow telling you where to fold your pleat. This is also cut on the fold of the fabric. So there is a fold of fabric here. So this pleat here is going to meet up in the center front of the garment. And then our first step is similar to our darts that we did last week. We are going to snip the center front which I've already done here. And then we're also going to snip just a little quarter of an inch onto each of the lines. Dotted lines and solid lines all get snipped. And this dotted line here, its little snip is the center front. That's where that line ends. Now I like to take a pin and I like to place the pin into the very, very end of this line. And I will do this again on all six lines. And notice that this one here is not exactly on the fold. It's just barely on the inside of it. Okay, so now that I've got that in place, I can remove these. And since my fabric is right sides together, we are going to pull this open kind of like a book. These little heart pins are also very cute. But in addition to that, I really love them for stuff like this because they're really long. And so I can kind of pull this back and not worry about them coming away from the fabric too much. Okay, so now we're going to take our water-erasable pin and we are going to place a dot on both areas where the pin comes in and out of the fabric. Okay, I've got them all marked. You can remove the paper, but don't put this away yet. Keep this close by. Open up your fabric and you can see that we have our sets of dots going all the way along our fabric. Now take your straight edge, whether that's in the way of the hot hammer or a ruler or whatever it is, and you're going to line up your dot, here's our first one, with the snip that we made. And that is going to provide our straight line. And you can also use your pattern as a guide. So for example, if we laid this so that it mimics the shape of our garment, then I know now that this is a solid line. This is a dashed line. This is a solid line. This is a dashed line, okay? Okay, I've got all my lines marked. And I wanted to point out that at the center front, don't forget, you've got two dashed lines that are going to meet at the same little notch. So don't get confused by that. But other than that, it pretty much just alternates. Okay, so the reason why we had to do this on the right side of the fabric is because that's how we get our folds. So I am going to bring in, and I just got my little Cricut EasyPress mat here. Obviously we would normally be doing this at our ironing board, but I didn't want to like move the camera and everything else. I just got my little Mini EasyPress and my EasyPress mat just to illustrate. But for what it's worth, this is a really neat little handy thing to have. Do you want to fold across your solid line, bring the fabric all the way flat and making sure that you've got your solid line completely on that fold, then press this in place like so. And you want to go through and press all, press a little crease into all of your solid lines. And we've got little baby pleats. So we're just going to take the crease that we've already made and we are going to match that up with the dotted line. And you want to make sure your dots line up and you want to make sure that your little snips match up here on the raw edge. And you want to make sure that the raw edge lines up as well. So kind of a lot of things to pay attention to here, but hold that in place, grab your pins. Another really great thing about these being so long is that you guessed it, you can hold this whole pleat with one pin. I really love these hard pins and they're cute. When you get to your sitter line, your pleat, the dot gets matched up with the dot closest to it, but it's actually going to cross over this little notch just ever so slightly. So that at your seam line, that's where the point is. That's where these two pleats should be matching up. So in order for them to match up and create a beautiful point, you know, right at the seam line, they need to cross over each other at the center front. So you can see there, these two guys overlap each other so that at the seam line, that's where our point is gonna be. Okay, so now we have our pleated panel all pinned in place. Isn't that great? So, so, so pretty. Now we are gonna go over to the machine and we are going to baste all along our raw edge up here at the seam line, catching all of our folds and then making sure that underneath, none of these get turned under like this. You want it to be all nice and flat, all the way across. Okay, our pleats are done, but if you remember we made all these marks on our fabric. So we're gonna use the eraser portion of our pen and we're gonna erase all these guys. So I like to erase the ones just below the seam allowance. It doesn't matter to get all up in there and erase everything, but you know, the ones that are gonna show through your fabric. This pen also works, you can erase it by just using like a spray bottle with some water. But this is linen and as we know, linen can kind of grow sometimes, especially when it gets wet. So I just wanna eliminate that as much as possible. And anyways, you get the idea of how to erase like magic, right? So cool. So pleats really are super, super simple to do. They just take a little bit of time because you wanna be really precise with it. But if you take the time to do them right, you will have perfect, beautiful pleats every single time. So don't forget that we have a little giveaway working in conjunction with this series. Got tons of comments in last week's video, which was so much fun for me to read. I read every single one of them. So all you have to do to enter the giveaway is leave a comment on this video and every video in the series. Each comment you leave will enter you again and again, but only one comment per video. So you can have up to eight entries into the giveaway because there are gonna be eight videos as part of this series, got it? Also, huge shout out to Clover for sponsoring this. I have a bunch of information about them in the description box as well as links to their products that I used in this video, as well as the ones in last week's video. There's also a link to last week's video down there. There's information about what I'm wearing. You guys are always asking me that. That's always in the description box as well. So head down there, get all the information that I'm sure you're wondering about. If you have a question that's not answered there, by all means, ask me in the comments section below. But leave your comment for the contest too and that's gonna do it for me today. Thank you all so much for watching. I'll see you soon, bye.