I’ve been reasonably productive today and got another exercise completed too. This time it involved manipulating pleats in fabric.
I started off with two different fabrics, both with stripes, which I used as the starting point for my pleats. I discovered that the width of the pleats and the spacing has quite an effect on how you are able to sew them down. I was surprised at how far apart you have to sew the topstitching lines to get the finished fabric to lie flat. I didn’t quite get it right on the green striped piece.
I experimented with using some embroidery stitches on the machine for the top-stitching.
The second piece was a small square of an african print.
It turned out rather smaller than I anticipated because of course the fabric got eaten up by the folds!
I was more successful with the spacing of the top-stitching on this piece. It does lie flat 
