Let the pleating begin

A couple nights ago I spend another four hours working on my ruff. It is coming out rather well I think. Now with all sixty-plus feet are assembled I began working on the pleating. I trimmed the length of the ruff to an even 5 inches. I then took a pencil made for marking material and marked every ¼ inch along the length. That turned out to be over 3,000 tick marks that had to be made. I then proceeded to put a stitch through each tick mark as the first step in the cartridge pleating process. It came out OK. Well, sort of OK. After pleating and then standing in front of the mirror with the ruff for a while I decided that I needed to tighten up the pleats. While attempting to tighten the pleats, I broke the binding thread and it all came apart. Luckily I took a picture of the ruff before that happened. The result looks much like the image from Janet Arnold’s book. I am happy with that, but now I have to pleat the whole thing again. Last night I spent about an hour beginning to pleat it again with a much heavier type of thread.