My Parasol

Date started: 09/09/05
Date finished: In Progress
Project for: Me (Jo)

I am going to a wedding at the Ren faire in Oct and I need something to keep the sun off me. I don't do "sun" very well. I searched online for instructions on making a parasol and found nothing. So here is what I did.
Materials List

• Umbrella- not the kind with lots of joints so they fold up into a very small unit. You want the kind that folds along the pole. I will post a picture soon.
• Lace
• Ribbon

Materials Cost Breakdown

• Umbrella: about $4 at Walmart
• Flat lace fabric: 1.5 yds 11.99 at JoAnn Fabrics
• Lace Trim: 5 yds $7.95 at JoAnn
• Lace Trim: 3 5/8 yds $13.01 at JoAnn

When I finish it, I will post a picture here.

Making the pattern.

First I made a pattern. I love the True Grid pattern drafting cloth and use a lot of it. That is what I am using here. It is similar to interfacing and has a blue grid printed on the cloth. I just opened the umbrella and placed the cloth over it, pinned it in place and cut a pattern.

Cutting out lace.

Using the pattern piece I just made- I cut out 8 pieces since this umbrella has 8 sections.

Sewing diagram coming soon!

Sew the sections together. I used a basting stitch for this because a smaller stitch would have just tangled.

Stitching lace overlay.

I handstitched the lace to the umbrella. This took a while. You can see that the bottom pulls up in some places so the next time I will cut it longer on the bottom. I would rather have enough and have to trim it than have too little, but I was close enough here and it worked. I used a curved needle to do the stitching and I don't think a straight would really work well. I highly recommend using curved needles for this project.

I stitched from the top of each spine to the tip, tying it every 3 or 4 inches or so. I didn't whip stitch the entire thing as I didn't feel I needed to do that. I also didn't stitch it in between the spines as I will be sewing lace on and the lace will get sewn through then.

Top ruffle.

Next I made the top ruffle. The flat lace I had, has scalloped edges and so I cut a piece from the edge to about 5 inches and I cut the strip 1 yd long. I stitched down the center of the strip, lengthwise, using a long basting stitch then gathered it. I place this on the top and tied off my gathering stitches so they would not come undone. Then I stitched this down to the spine in two places.

Sewing black edge lace.

Then I took the wide lace trim and hand sewed that on using the curved needle again. I tacked it down to the spines and then tacked it in two places in each section and then ran a running stitch all the way around using small stitches.

Time invested so far: about 6 hours

I am so happy with how it is looking so far and it is far from finished.

Adding blk lace.

I added the black lace around the middle.

Detail of top.

I had a small bit of lace left over from the bottom so I took that, scrunched it up and added it underneath the top ruffle for some contrast.

Time invested so far: about 8 hours

I have deemed it done enough for the wedding and will work on *other* projects I must finish for Cynthia's wedding. If I have time, I can come back to this. I still want to get some more of the flat red lace and add a ruffle just above the bottom one.