How to Sew Ruffles

Today I'm gonna show you some easy way to create ruffles that you can add to any project. Now, I have a couple different ruffles here in front of me. One, more of the traditional ruffle you think about and where the fabric is gathered sort of unevenly in some places and just looks nice and pretty here. And I have another one here that's created actually by forming pleats in your fabric and it looks a little bit more uniform and is less puffy if that's the kind of ruffle that you wanna use. So we're gonna start by showing you how to make this one right here. And ruffles are one of those things where you can make them as little or as long or however you want depending on your project, but know that you're going to have to start off with a lot more fabric than how your ruffle is actually gonna be lengthwise. So this little ruffle here was actually made using a strip of fabric this long. So keep that in mind when you're thinking about how long you want your ruffle to be. Also you could make it a little less gathered. That is going to make your ruffle a little bit longer. That's something you can do too. But for either way, this is how you make this kind of ruffle. I have a strip of fabric here and you could make them two inches, three inches, really depends. I wouldn't get too much bigger than three inches because you're gonna sort of lose the ruffle the further out you get in the fabric from the stitching. So what I wanna do is make a couple modifications to my stitch length before I get started. We're gonna do sort of a basting stitch. And a lot of times a basting stitch is a longer stitch to begin with and we're gonna do one that's even longer than that. I want your stitch to be as long as it can possibly go on your machine whether that's five millimeters or a certain number of stitches per inch. You want it as long as it can possibly go. So I'm gonna do is take my strip of fabric and I'm going to run a length of stitching all the way along right through the middle. And see, it'll go really, really fast because your stitch length is so long. And I'm just gonna sew right off the edge, lift up my foot. And if you have an automatic cutter on your machine, this is not a time when you wanna use it because you need to have sort of a long piece of your thread to be able to actually gather. So I'm pulling off six, eight, 12 inches. It's not gonna hurt if you have a little bit of extra. So now that I have this, what I wanna do is take my bobbin thread, and you can actually do this with either one. For some reason I find it a little bit easier with the bobbin thread. And we're just gonna start pulling it and gathering our fabric. And you wanna do this kind of easy. You don't wanna pull too hard and break your thread. But you just sort of keep working your ruffle as you go. And you can go halfway, then maybe go over to this side and work the ruffle in from this side. That might be a little bit easier. And again, you're making it to fit whatever pre-measured length you have or you're making it either as gathered or flat as you want. But really, ruffles are something that you can make a bunch of and probably no two are gonna look alike. But it's something that you can make and add to anything. So here we have just a simple ruffle. And you keep going along sort of making sure that it at least looks uniformly ruffled throughout the whole piece. Now, when you get to the point where you want to actually sew this onto a project, I don't want my ruffle to start coming undone, so I'm actually just gonna take these two pieces of thread and I just tie 'em in a little knot here. And I know it's not going to come undone past this point. Right there. So I know even if it starts slipping a little bit, can only go so far. So that's just an easy way to make sure it's not gonna come undone more than you want when you're going to attach it to something. Now, another way you can do your ruffle is this one here. Again, a little bit more spaced out of a ruffle, but this is made by forming pleats. So what we're gonna do is I have another strip of fabric and I like to just sort of do ruffles freeform. I don't want 'em to look too uniform because I want 'em to just sort of add a little bit of texture to a project but not be too meticulous about them. So I'm just going to not make any markings on my fabric when I start this. And I'll start by showing that and then show you how you could do the markings if you wanted to be a little more particular about your ruffles. Now, what I wanna do is I wanna put my machine back to whatever the standard stitch length is on your machine. We don't need that really long stitch anymore. So I'm gonna do a couple stitches, just do a needle down. And I'm gonna create a little fold in the fabric, just like that. I'm gonna stitch up to the fold, not past it yet, and then create another fold, and then stitch a little further. Make another little fold. Stitch a little further. And I would just keep doing this all the way along our fabric. So we can do a couple more here and you can see my folds may not always be the same size, they're not always spaced apart the same, but that's kind of how I want this ruffle to look. So I finish off the stitching here. Bring it over to show you. And again, you can see how long of a piece we started with and how short it looks by the end. And you can see all of them are not quite the same length and I kinda like that. I want it to be a little bit different. But if you want it to be more uniform, what you would do is take your strip of fabric. Take a ruler and make some marks on here. So maybe I want my thing to start, my ruffle to start right here. So make a little, get some lead out here, make a little mark. And I'm just using a regular pencil here just so you can really see what my marks are. You would want to either use some sort of removable fabric marker, something that's not going to be a permanent big black line on your fabric. But then what I wanna do is say I wanna make a fold every half inch. So I have my other line right here. Measure half inch down, make another mark. Half inch, make a mark. Can do that all the way down. And then what you would do is you would take and fold it and put mark to mark all the way down and that ensures that all of your folds are the same width, they're evenly spaced, and you would have a nice sort of perfect row of pleats going all the way down. Now, if none of that sounds like something you wanna do and you just wanna be able to stitch and just make it an easy ruffle, you can actually buy a ruffler foot or a foot that makes pleats like this and it goes really easy. You just sew like regular and it actually makes the folds in your fabric. It is something that does not come standard with your machine, so if you're not going to be doing this a lot, maybe it's not something that you wanna purchase or something like that. This is just a quick and easy way to use your standard machine, your standard foot, a simple straight stitch, and you can make a multiple of any kinds of fun ruffles to add to any project. So I hope you give this a try.