Making A Ruffle Scarf

One of the best things about learning to sew at this point in time is the abundance of sewing tutorials out there. I have enough intriguing projects on my Pinterest Sewing board to last a long time (although I WILL have to look at a real pattern one of these days). This week I made a ruffle scarf from this tutorial!

Gandalf loves to help with creative projects. ♥

I bought three T-shirts at thrift (to make three scarves – why stop at one?). I love these colors. The instructions said to use “knit,” so I made sure all the shirts were blends and not 100% cotton. The yellow and gray were plain men’s T-shirts, but the fuschia is a women’s shirt. You can’t see the silver airbrushing on the side or the weird gathers, but trust me, it’s a nice fabric begging to be made into something less garish. (Sewing is already changing the way I look at thrift clothes. I’m more aware of the quality of the material, not just the garment itself. There’s a lot of potential there!)

This was a good beginner project because it gave me a chance to experiment with different stitches and tension settings. Basically, you cut off the T-shirt below the sleeves, cut it in half longways, “open” each half at the seam, and stitch those together to make one long strip of fabric. Then you fold or pin the strip in thirds lengthwise and do long “basting” stitches along the fold. This is the basic ruffling method. It was easy enough, although I had to keep moving the fabric to make sure it didn’t ruffle back on itself. You go over the folds twice with the basting stitches, then again with a normal stitch to secure. Then you’re supposed to rip out the basting stitches, but I figured, why bother? I was happy with the final product and didn’t want to mess with it.

I’ve gotten rave reviews on the scarf and can’t wait to make more! The others should go faster now that I know what to do, but this one only took about an hour anyway.

Peach wasn’t so thrilled with it, though. :)