I started out "playing", trying to work out exactly how to go about pleating. Since it looked like the instructions for stacking pleats would work, I now had to sort out what measurements would give me the look that I was after. This turned out to be quite a bit harder than I'd anticipated. I also ran into a problem of exactly how to get this nice little stack of pleats to line up tidily long enough to sew them, when there is over three inches of un-pleated lace hanging off one side. What I hit upon was marking out tramlines of stitch points, and then picking up the points on a pair of threads and so gathering the whole length.

This effectively give me seven and a half feet of tightly pleated lace. I'm fairly sure that this may not be the quickest way to get this done, but it has the big advantage (for me at least) or not relying upon any unusual degrees of manual dexterity since the threads stop all the pleats coming undone if you happen to let go of them.

Here you can see a slightly different angle - by gathering the top of each fold tightly together you get the bottom fold almost for free. Needless to say the careful measuring should ensure that the pleats all end out the same size.

Now the fun part. You loosen off the gathers and start stacking the pleats.

Unfortunately this is also where I first realized that I'd screwed up. Originally I'd pleated everything so that the pleats were half an inch wide (the stitch marks were one inch apart). No matter how I laid out the stacks I couldn't get the shape I was after. Either the eights were too tall - and three inches high was just too tall, or the eights were too short and wide, the individual loops were very flat and oval. I thought that I'd managed to get an arrangement that worked but then had the luck to try bending the proto-ruff around a neck-like form. That convinced me that there just wasn't enough fabric at the outer edge of the ruff to ever manage the shape that I was after and so I took it all apart :-( Washed it, ironed it and started again. Luckily for me this is when I found out that the lace I'd bought was worth what I'd paid for it since after the ironing I couldn't tell that it had ever been written on in pencil and half sewn. Phew! Whilst I'd wasted some time, the fabric was perfect and I was safe to start again.

This time I tried quarter inch pleats, this took forever :-( Then I found that with the pleats that small I had to stack five of them on top of each other to get the effect that I wanted. Time for a few long evenings of stacking and pinning.

However this time things worked out correctly and I ended out with a shape that looked really very promising. Next I just ran it through the machine to lock it in place, trimmed the rough edge smooth (since the lace I'd started with was scalloped) and wrapped a bit more fabric over the pleated edge to make a collar band for the ruff.

I fitted the ruff with a couple of hooks and eyes since I really didn't want to have to bother with laces.

Then I washed the ruff again - too much handling had left it a bit grimy and I'd figured that either it was going to be washable or I'd never wear it, so that could start right now :-)

Since the eights weren't sewn into place it was easy to splay them flat and iron the smooth after the wash. Then I saturated the loops of the ruff with Niagara heavy duty starch (I tried to avoid starching the collar). Next I went through best part of a roll of kitchen paper making little paper cylinders with which to stretch out all of the loops. Once I'd got them all stuffed, I re-sprayed them all with more starch - I figured that there was probably no such thing as too much starch for what I was looking for. Then I left the ruff overnight to dry out.

BTW. The yellow color in this shot is just a side effect of me not using the flash on the camera - it really is still white - honest.

Here's the final result. I took out all of the curlers (which I'll keep for next time) and have a fairly solid ruff. Certainly it doesn't get bent out of shape much, and the starch keeps it very resilient.