Ha ha, you like that move, where I don’t blog for years, drop one short blog, and then disappear again for a month?

Uh, yeah, that move could go into “How to Run an Unsuccessful Blog: The Book.”

I didn’t mean to stay away so long again; I’m sorry. My previous post dropped the week before a 10-day vacation, and, of course, the week after vacation is trying to get back into the swing of things.

Which brings us here, now. Hi. You look cute. Thanks for showing up to my corner of the internet.

Let’s get down to business: This upcycled/reimagined ruffle skirt of many skirts.

To bring you up to speed, this ruffly gal comprises two skirts, the skirt of a dress, and fabric from my stash.

I used the white skirt with black polka dots as the base for a few reasons:

  • The ready-to-wear waistband is comfy and made with a wide band of elastic. It was the nicest looking and softest of the skirt options.
  • The white skirt has a lining, and the others did not. We’re pretty much are in agreement that lined skirts are a “yea,” and lined WHITE skirts are a “double yea”? Plus, the lining was knee length, and the original skirt length was midi/tea, which created that very Millennial look of “long sheer skirt with short lining.” (I personally find that to be a dated silhouette, but I’ll probably come back around to it in five years, LOL.)
  • Of the fabric options, I thought the white field/black dots would look nicest (subjective, I know) with the greatest number of tops. If I’d chosen a fabric with a black field, my black tops (of which I have a lot) would have blended into a black waistband/yoke, creating a faux drop-waist dress. I like the idea of a drop-waist dress, but I don’t think the silhouette looks great on my figure.

Skirt Inspiration

Look familiar?

The inspiration for this skirt came from a book I’ve had in my sewing library for about a year — “Sew It Yourself: 20 Pattern-Free Projects (and Infinite Variations) to Make Your Dream Wardrobe” by Daisy Braid. This was a book I procured but hadn’t made anything from.

The construction steps I used to sew the skirt.

The looks in the book are dead-simple to pattern and sew — it’s primarily rectangles, a few curves, and some gathering here and there — a great book for a beginning garment sewist. For someone with experience, it’s a great jumping-off point for exploring new techniques (e.g., patchwork). If you had special yardage — like a big print, for example — these simple silhouettes with minimal seams would be a fab way to show off fabric. Catch my drift with the photo below:

How I Made the Ruffle Tiers

Let’s get into construction business.

The first step was figuring out overall skirt length. I put the in-process skirt on an Erin-sized dress form and played around until I thought the proportions were correct. I wanted something that went from my true waist to my kneecaps; that is 25 inches.

A good height for the ruffles was 10 inches, which created a pleasing amount of white-with-black-dot yoke area and landed just below the inseam pockets. I wanted the upper ruffle tier to overlap the lower ruffle tier without gapping or covering too much of the lower tier.

I did math to calculate the width of each patchwork fabric panel. I wanted lots of volume with these lightweight fabrics, so I used the “big” number. I stretched the hem of the white-with-black-dots skirt, measured it (43.5 inches), and multiplied it by 2 (87 inches) for mega ruffles.

Beep boop bop, do some more calculations for two tiers of ruffles, and it turned out I needed 21.75 feet of ruffles. (To make things easier, I rounded up to 22 feet.)

Now, I was working with four different fabrics… 22 feet divided by 4 fabrics equals 5.5 feet (or 66 inches) of each type of fabric.

I had the 10-inch height locked in, but how wide did each piece of patchwork need to be? I made it easy on myself — 66 inches divided by 11 inches equals six patchwork panels for each fabric. (I ended up with six panels, six panels, five panels, and seven panels, because one fabric had some excess and one fabric ran short.)

I made a 10-by-11-inch (plus seam allowance, natch) cardstock pattern piece to accelerate fabric cutting, and I tried to keep pattern pieces on grain (or at least crossgrain) to minimize twisting/weird drooping. I wasn’t too worried about these small rectangles being off grain because they were going to be hanging loosely from the garment.

To build the ruffle rows, I laid the panels on the floor and shuffled them until I was happy with the order. I prevented duplicate fabrics from touching in each row. But, as you can see, I couldn’t keep them from touching vertically, as the upper row hangs over the lower row. Maybe I could have done more to mix up the patchwork, but I had to call it at some point. I’m happy with the overall visual result.

Using a Gathering Foot

Would you believe this was my first time using a gathering foot? I’ve been stockpiling presser feet for years and hadn’t gotten around to using this lil’ guy.

My thoughts on the gathering foot are mixed, and mixed mostly because of user error/decisions.

The black with white dots rayon DID NOT like being gathered. I ended up with a bird’s nest multiple times, which could have been from stitch length, upper thread tension, needle, or weight of the fabric. (Or needing to rethread the machine.) I wasn’t doing myself any favors by switching fabric types on the same line of gathering stitching.

I watched gathering foot videos and referred to the info sheet that came with the foot, and all instances encouraged increasing the upper thread tension.

According to the info sheet, “if needle tension is tightened, more fullness; if less tension, less fullness.”

I wanted more fullness, so I bumped up the tension. I found, however, increasing the tension made the thread difficult to adjust after I used the gathering foot. When I pulled the thread to shift gathers, the thread would inevitably break.

I think the idea with the gathering foot is that the fabric is so perfectly gathered, there’s no need to adjust it afterward. The gathering presser foot has a slot in which you can slip ungathered (flat) fabric as you sew. The top later of fabric is gathered and sewn, in one step, to the flat piece of fabric in the slot below it.

Measuring gathered ruffle quarter to compare against skirt quarter to which it will be attached.
Sewing the upper gathered ruffle tier to the yoke took some concentration. I wanted the yoke half of the seam to be flat and smooth and the ruffle half of the seam to have gathers and volume. To this end, I had to make sure the small pleats in the skirt yoke were not stretched or pulled flat during sewing. Here are the pleats doing their pleat thing with the gathered ruffle atop.
Here are the pleats pulled flat. Sewing the ruffle tier to the skirt yoke with the skirt yoke pleats flat would have made the seam extra long and the gathers less full than desired.

Love this idea in principle, and it’s probably rad if you don’t have to be precise with the length of the gathers. For example, if you needed to sew a ruffle to a pillow, you could have the strip to be ruffled, with length to spare, and stitch it to the flat pillow face with the gathering foot until you ran out of pillow face perimeter.

I, however, was trying to match quarter lengths of skirt to quarter lengths of ruffle, so I needed to slide the fabric along the thread a little here and a little there to match those lengths.

The settings that worked best for me were max length straight stitch (5 mm) and lowest upper thread/needle tension (something in the 2-3-ish range). Then I would hold my left finger behind the presser foot to “crowd” the fabric as it passed under the needle. This move increases the number of gathers, because you’re forcing more fabric under the presser foot than the feed dogs would normally feed.

This post gives an overview of crowding. I first learned about it in a Nancy Zieman book. Crowding is common in industrial sewing, as there are no pins allowed (!) on the production floor; pins could hurt workers or damage machines. So, talented needlewomen need to find a way to ease fabric with their hands.

Back to using the gathering foot, though! I found the lower needle tension made it easier to adjust gathers — fewer broken threads.

In conclusion, I now have another way to gather, and it’s faster than the traditional sewing 2-3 lines of basting stitches and pulling the threads to adjust fabric length.

Raw Edge Finish

When I envisioned this upcycle, I knew right away that I was going to use an exposed edge finish. I could seam the panels and finish raw edges in one go, and the edge finish could be a uniting feature of disparate fabrics.

This serger stitch is a three-thread narrow hem overlock, and it’s hands down my favorite way to finish floaty, lightweight fabrics. You don’t have to deal with turning the edge under twice (and possibly ending up with a little twist in the hem). It’s also nice if you’re hemming an A-line or circle skirt, where you’d otherwise gather the bottom edge to turn up the hem smoothly.

The three-thread narrow hem overlock reminds me of as a kid outlining shapes while coloring. Drawings looked so good with a crayon-breaking hard outline; they seemed more grounded and sophisticated. People underestimate the importance of line weight in design!

Anyhoo, the three-thread narrow hem overlock makes finishing lightweight fabric hems easy peasy.

Big-Time 80s Vibes

When I finished this skirt and asked my husband to take photos, he remarked the look was very Cyndi Lauper coded. He’s the best, truly.

Over to you: Are you down with floofy ruffles? Are you down with Cyndi Lauper? If no, how do you live with yourself? (LOL jk but not really — but it’s not a hostile thing, either.) What are your feelings about patchwork garments? Please share in the comments, Dear Ones.