DIY Boutique Ruffle Trim Pants

Good Morning!
Fall is getting closer, and I found myself going threw Austin and Hannah's closets. Hannah has grown so much over the summer, it's almost unbelievable. All of her pants are "floods", so I went on a tutorial search for adding ruffles to the hem of pants. This adds more length to the pants, and extends their wear. I really couldn't find much of anything, at least nothing with pictures, so that is what led me to this tutorial. Please keep in mind, I'm a super duper beginner sewer. To be honest, if I can do it, anyone can, seriously - you should see me on a sewing machine, I can't even keep the speed of the presser foot even. Anyway, I'm guessing this little project will save me lots of money down the road, so it's definitely worth the time and effort.

1) Get the jeans you'd like to alter, and the fabric you'd like to use for the ruffle. To figure out how much you need, measure the diameter of the hem of the pants and then multiply that by at least 2, or up to 2.5. This will be your length. Hannah's pants were 12 inches in diameter at the hem, so I chose to cut the fabric piece to 24 inches. I could have gone a bit longer for fluffier ruffles. For the height of your rectangle fabric piece, determine how much length you need to add to your pants. I wanted to add 1.5 inches, so I cut the rectangle to 4 inches in height, and trimmed off an inch from the material of the pants.

• My finished fabric rectangles measured out to be 4" x 24" - cut two of these at the size needed.
  
  

2). Iron, fold and pin down the bottom of each rectangle piece to make the hem.

3) Sew the hem, and then on the top of the fabric, stitch across two rows, the entire length of your fabric (this is for gathering and creating the ruffle). Make sure not to reverse stitch at either end of these rows so that you will be able to manipulate the fabric.

4). Take the top thread from each row in your hand, and slowly slide the fabric down. This will force the fabric strip to ruffle. Be careful not to break the thread, and use short quick pulling motions to gather it. This step takes a bit of time.

5) Once the fabric is gathered down to the length of the original pant hem diameter (Hannah's were 12"), sew the ends together to form circles.

6) Pin the fabric, wrong side facing you, to the bottom of the pants. The right sides of the fabric should be facing each other.

7) Sew along the bottom gathering line to ensure that the gathers won't peak threw once folded over.

8) Flip the ruffle down, and top stitch along the edge of the top of the ruffle to secure it down, otherwise the ruffles will have a tendency to flip up.

There it is! It's really pretty easy, and a forgiving project as well. I made a handful of mistakes along the way, I still think they turned out pretty good.