Sewing: The technique of making ruffles by bunching up a longer piece of fabric and sewing it to a shorter one.
Many sewing projects assume you already know how to gather, and give pretty cursory instructions. Below is a detailed, step by step description of the process.
To gather, you will need two pieces of fabric of different lengths. The longer one, which I will call piece A, will become the ruffle. The shorter one, piece B, is the thing you want to attach a ruffle to. Both are assumed to include a seam allowance.
- Find the midpoint and quarter points of both pieces. Make a small cut at each of those points - just enough that you'll be able to find them again.
- Reduce the thread tension on your sewing machine. Your stitches should look normal on top, but on the bottom they should be a set of loops with the bobbin thread running through them.
- Turn piece A right side up and sew two parallel lines of stitching along the edge to be gathered, keeping well within the seam allowance. Don't cross the lines of stitching, or the whole thing won't work. When you get to the end, don't backstitch. Leave long threads on each end of the stitching.
- Lay pieces A and B together, right sides together, so that the mid- and quarter-points match up. Pin them at the ends of the stitching and at the points you've just lined up. A will have lots of extra fabric between each pin.
- On one end of the stitching you've just done, wrap the bobbin threads around the end pin.
- Now for the tricky part. On the other end of the line of stitching, gently pull the bobbin threads. As piece A starts to pucker, feed the gathers through the pinned areas until the A and B are the same length.
- Wrap the bobbin threads you've just been pulling on around the pin at the end of the gather.
- Pin the gathers every inch or so, ensuring the puckering is evenly distributed.
- Re-adjust your thread tension to normal stitching.
- Keeping piece A up, carefully sew the two pieces together along the seam allowance. Before removing any pins, turn the whole thing over and look at piece B. If you've stitched down any extra folds or tucks by accident, unpick that area with your seam ripper and re-stitch.
- Unpin (make sure you get all the pins out...they hide really well in gathers!), pull out all the loose threads, and press. You'll want to iron both sides of the seam toward piece B, because the gathered bit doesn't fold that well.
Congratulations, you've just made a ruffle. You can use your new skills to make curtains, skirts, and foppish shirts.