sew ruffles!

I found this great tutorial (of course) over at Bramblewood Fashion and decided to try my first sewing project with clothing. I went to Goodwill and found a couple long sleeve shirts that I liked in coordinating colors because I wanted to mix it up a bit. Here is the first ruffle shirt



This one is so easy (even for me)! All you do is fold the shirt in half so the seams match up, cut the sleeves off around the elbow (about 13 inches for me) then I opened up the seams on one of the sleeves I cut off. I cut that into strips, sewed down the middle of each strip and pulled on the ends of the string to make my ruffle. Tip: don't use cheap thread. It will break when you pull on it for your ruffle....that was annoying. Check out Bramblewood's link for the complete tutorial.

Here's a close up of the ruffles



On the next shirt I decided to mix it up a bit. This one had a little more of a scoop neck to begin with so I measured 1 inch around the neck in the front and cut it to make it a little lower, then I attached my ruffles around the collar instead of in rows.



And I used my left over pink sleeve to make a flower!!



I cut the open sleeve in half long ways then cut it in half. Then I folded the cut section in half again long ways and sewed it along the open seams. Then I cut out little petal patterns along the fold. Then I layered them on top of each other and hand stitched them together until I had a flower. Then I hand sewed the flower to the shirt. It sounds more complicated than it actually was, this shirt took longer, but not that much longer than the first.


forgive the blurry (bad) photos... maybe photography should be my next hobby!

I can't wait to go ruffle some more things! Think Jeff would notice if I ruffled H's clothes? Hummmm...