An important part of saving money when clothing our children is to upcycle, recycle or fix existing, damaged and outgrewn clothes. Not only for girls for also for boys this can be done, minus the ruffles:)
Here is a cute t-shirt my daughter outgrew:
It still fit across the chest nicely but the length was lacking a couple of inches. There are several things to do with it! I chose to simply extend the length by adding ruffles! The t-shirt was made from knit so I chose an old white t-shirt for its “donor” and cut a strip off about three times the width (measured from side to side) of my t-shirt and about 3″ long (measured from top to bottom).
First step: since I wanted to mimic the cute rolled lettuce edge hems on the sleeves I set my serger to “rolled hems” and hemmed the top and bottom edge of my strip:
Then I ruffled the top edge and folded the ruffle strip in half and pinned then sewed the small edges together (marked with pink dashes). I backstitched beginning and end:
Second step: I place my sewn together ruffle underneath my t-shirt’s bottom hem:
Third step: I place the ruffle back underneath my t-shirt’s back……….
……..to prevent from pinning through the t-shirt I placed a magazine into the t-shirt:
Fourth step: I pinned ruffle to the bottom hem (and made sure I have the ruffle’s side seam on my t-shirts side seam) of the t-shirt and sewed it on with a knit stitch (or slight zigzag stitch)
Last step would be to tuck in hanging threads and tack them down.
Done! One less thing to buy!
If you like this tutorial please pin it:
For more tutorials please click HERE!
Whimsy Couture Patterns on ETSY:
I’ve done this with shirts or even added long sleeves and a bottom hem to my son’s outgrown shirts, rolled cuffs to pants to disguise the added length…the list goes on. I’m not sure if my machine actually has a “knit” stitch, though.