How to Add a Ruffle Hem to a Dress (Easy Sewing Tutorial)
In this easy sewing tutorial I’m going to show you how to transform a dress with a simple addition. Adding a ruffle hem to a dress is a beginner-friendly modification that opens up a whole range of looks from a single pattern.
For this tutorial I used the Dayshift Dress from Sewlike. The Dayshift is a classic shift dress with a gathered neckline, enormous pockets and unique lantern sleeves. It’s designed to be easy to hack, so it really lends itself well to our purpose here today.
Make your dress
Make your dress according to the instructions in the pattern, but leave the bottom of your dress unfinished. Fold up the bottom hem by 5/8” and press with a warm iron. Try on your dress and decide how deep you want to make your ruffle hem.
Decide how deep to make your ruffle
The choice is yours. Make your hem deep and it becomes a tier of the dress. Make it shallow and it will be more decorative. A common reason to add a ruffle hem is to lengthen a dress or top that you find too short, and you can use this tutorial to add a ruffled hem to ready-to-wear garments and finished makes as well.
Once you have settled on a depth, you will need to add hem allowance and seam allowance to your depth to determine how wide your strip of fabric needs to be. I chose a 4” deep ruffle, so I added 5/8” seam allowance and I used the 5/8” double-fold hem from the original pattern, so I added an extra 1 ¼” hem allowance.
So: 4” + 5/8” + 1 ¼” = 6” deep strip needed.
Decide how gathered you want your ruffle to be
The main factor that determines how a ruffle will look, is how gathered you make it. Ruffle styles vary. You can choose anything from 1.25 to 2 times the overall length of the hem for cottons and linens, but for silks, chiffon and other very light fabrics you could push that to 2.5 times. Just bear in mind that the more densely gathered the fabric is, the more bulk you will have at the seam. Fabric choice will affect how your ruffle looks and lightweight fabrics will look best.
I chose to use twice the length of the hem for a more dense ruffle. Don’t confuse this with a double ruffle, which is when you make two separate ruffled strips and place them one on top of the other!
Work out the length of the ruffle
This requires a bit of easy maths. Lay your dress flat and measure the hem from one side seam to the other. Double that and you have the actual length of your hem. For a 2 times ruffle, you simply double that again, since you want a strip of fabric twice as long as your hem to have a final length that matches your actual hem.
My dress measured 35” flat, so: 35” x 2 = 70” hem length.
I made a 2 times ruffle, so: 70” x 2 = 140” strip of fabric needed.
My fabric was less than 140” long, so I cut two 70” x 6” strips.
I didn’t worry about adding in a seam allowance for joining the two strips, but if you’re making a smaller dress or you’re adding a ruffle to a cuff or neckline, you will need to add seam allowance to each end of both strips.
Sew your ruffle
Work smarter, not harder. I will show you how to hem your ruffle while it’s still flat.
Join the two strips into one long strip, using a ¼” seam allowance and a straight stitch on your sewing machine or serger (overlocker).
Sew the gathering threads. You will sew two rows of gathering thread. Set your sewing machine to the longest stitch length and sew one row at ¼” in from the raw edge, and another row ½” in along the long edge. Leave long tails at both ends and do not backstitch. You’ll be pulling on these later in the gathering process.
Here’s where I do things a little differently to other sewists. I like to work smarter, not harder, so I hem my ruffle strip now, while it’s flat, rather than later when it’s gathered and attached to the bottom edge of the dress! So go ahead and press up a double 5/8” hem. We’re going to sew it in a moment.
Making sure that your fabric strip is not twisted, join the two strips at the raw edges to make a loop. Sew with a long stitch length and a ¼” seam allowance or serge. Press the seam open if you used a sewing machine. Tuck the tails inside the hem.
Using an edging foot if you have one, edgestitch the hem down all the way around. Give it a good press again.
Identify the bobbin threads on your rows of gathering stitches and pull gently from one end. Even out the gathers with your fingers as you go, and remember that you have two ends to work from, so don’t try to move gathers down the whole 140” length of the fabric! I find it works best to work from one end to get a finished gathered length of 35” on one half, then switch and work from the other end to do the other half. Gather until the top edge of the ruffle measures 70”.
To attach the ruffle hem evenly to the bottom of the dress, we’re going to have to imagine that the Dayshift has side seams. Lay the dress flat, and mark the raw edge where it folds on both sides. This is where your side seams would be. You’re going to use these marks to align the top edge of the ruffle to the bottom edge of the dress.
Place dress and ruffle RST (right sides together) and pin at the notional side seam markings, then pin at the centre front and centre back. Then work around each quarter of the rest of the ruffle edge pinning and evening out the gathers as you go. Take your time and make everything as even as you can. The ruffle pieces should be the same length as the bottom edge of the dress.
Once you’re happy with how it looks, sew the top of the ruffle to the dress and finish the seam. You can do this all on the sewing machine, or you can sew and then serge, or you can just serge.
Put your dress on and admire your new ruffle hem as you twirl!
That’s all you need to know to make the ruffle hem that I made, but read on if you’d like to know more about ruffles and how to add them to your me made clothes.
Other types of ruffle
I’ve shown you how to make a simple gathered ruffle, but other ruffle styles are possible. You can make circular ruffles, also sometimes called flounce ruffles, or just flounces. These are a bit more involved than simple ruffles to draft, but they’re quicker to sew.
Flounce ruffles start life as a spiral and it is because the inner edge is shorter than the outer edge that they look ruffled once sewn. They’re quicker to sew than gathered ruffles because the inner edge is the same length as the hem they’re sewn to. This is also why they’re trickier to draft, because you have to create a spiral with the right inner edge length.
Ways to speed up gathering
If you find the gathering process lengthy, but you’re not interested in drafting flounce ruffles, you might find a different gathering technique works better for you.
Use a gathering foot
A gathering foot will gather the fabric and stitch it at the same time. Some gathering feet will only gather a single layer, which you then attach to your dress bottom. Other gathering feet will allow you to gather one layer and attach it to your dress bottom in one pass.
Using a gathering foot will speed up the gathering process, but it does have some drawbacks compared to the slow and steady hand gathering approach. It takes some fiddling to find the stitch length that gives you the amount of gathering that you want, and attaching a strip of fabric to the hem of a dress and ruffling as you go may result in excess fabric left over if the strip is gathered less than you accounted for.
Use the fishing line trick
The fishing line or dental floss trick is a way to make hand gathering more foolproof. One problem with sewing lines of gathering stitches with thread is that the thread can break as you’re pulling on it. It’s one reason we sew two lines of gathering threads – one is a back up in case the other snaps – and why we go slowly and carefully as we gather our fabric. Fishing line and waxed dental floss are much stronger than sewing thread and can withstand more forceful gathering.
To use the fishing line trick to make gathers, lay a piece of fishing line against your fabric and sew a wide zig zag stitch over the fishing line, being careful not to snag it with the needle. Then, grab the ends of the fishing line and ease the fabric along it. The fabric will magically gather!
Be sure to remove the fishing line after attaching your finished ruffle to your dress.
This hack can be applied to any dress, but if you want to replicate my dress, you will need the Dayshift Dress from Sewlike (Etsy listing).
The ruffle hem added just enough length for me to feel comfortable when sitting in this dress. #sewnshownseated